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[LordBucket]

This is a speculative thread about a hypothetical alternate universe in which humanity made different choices, and created a different world.

The premise:

Using exclusively 1970s or older technology, create Star trek.

 * Solve world hunger
 * Solve all production and supply chain issues
 * Expand the human race into space and colonize other planets and solar systems
 * Create a world of abundance where "working for money to live" is simply not done, nobody is compelled  by force or circumstances to engage in work other than what they choose for themselves, and yet everyone can have just about anything they want for a reasonably easy investment of effort

You are not constrained by greed or selfishness. The human race chooses to work together to create a harmonious future. War and crime and terrorism and all social issues that end in -ism are all instantly irrelevant non-issues because 99% of humanity simply decides to start being nice to each other. All world leaders and corporate barons are on board with creating a bright and shining future.

How do you do it?

[MarcAFK]

I'm going to have to side with Aldus Huxley and my good friend dr Timothy Leery and assume that drugs are involved.

[TheDarkStar]

It might not solve all the problems, but at least 3/4 of them could be solved by causing a global nuclear war at the height of the cold war. No food problems, no future war, no work, etc. It's so easy without people!

[mainiac]

How do you do it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder

Build a mass driver on the moon to serve as your source of iron, carbon, oxygen and silicon.  Send a mission to a comet that uses the comet itself as reaction mass to move a massive hydrogen and oxygen source into an orbit near earth.  Launching people from earth would be expensive but it's a one time expense.

This takes the problems of land disputes and property ownership and turns them into simple matters of manufacturing.  Armies kill each other for land because only one side can have the land at a time.  Armies dont kill each other for manufactured goods.  It's always easier to just build more manufactured goods then fight a war.

Dispute over O'Neil cylinder ownership?  Just build two new ones and split them like Solomon.
Refugee crisis?  Just build more O'Neil cylinders
Hunger crisis?  More O'Neil cylinders will do the trick!

Once the population is living in space and war is a thing of the past, you can strap nuclear power plants onto some of the O'Neil cylinders and send them off into space as starships.

[Cthulhu]

Put the best and brightest, along with those with critical skills for colonization (engineering, farming, development, etc.) into a ship and fire it into space.

Nuke everything else to the ground.  As two robots from the future once said:  "There are no more elephants.  There is also no more unethical treatment of elephants."

[Loud Whispers]

Put the best and brightest, along with those with critical skills for colonization (engineering, farming, development, etc.) into a ship and fire it into space.

And so begins Alpha Centauri

[miauw62]

and then somebody invents Conjoiner drives and Swan Alpha is colonized before the first generation ship gets there.

[SirQuiamus]

*snip*

...and then Side 7 was conquered by Zeon.

[LordBucket]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder

Send a mission to a comet that uses the comet itself as reaction mass to move a massive hydrogen and oxygen source into an orbit near earth.  Launching people from earth would be expensive but it's a one time expense.

This takes the problems of land disputes and property ownership and turns them into simple matters of manufacturing.  Armies kill each other for land because only one side can have the land at a time.  Armies dont kill each other for manufactured goods.  It's always easier to just build more manufactured goods then fight a war.

Dispute over O'Neil cylinder ownership?  Just build two new ones and split them like Solomon.
Refugee crisis?  Just build more O'Neil cylinders
Hunger crisis?  More O'Neil cylinders will do the trick!

This "does space stuff" but I'm not sure it's either necessary or a good solution for the problems you address. There's not really any shortage of land here on earth. Maybe there's a shortage of fertile land, or areas with nice climate to next oceans, and so forth, but if those are what you're looking for the moon isn't a very good place to find them.

Build a mass driver on the moon to serve as your source of iron, carbon, oxygen and silicon. 

What do you mean by this? The gravity advantage would make it relatively easy to fire materials from the moon into an ocean drop, but in your scenario you want those materials on the moon. I'm not sure whether Earth-to-space cargo transport via mass driver is practical within the 1970s technology limitation. There are proposals to do it, Star Tram for example, but that's 2001. Most of the earlier projects appear to be gas based, and mostly for launching weapon projectile to terrestrial targets, not for putting stuff into space. And even most of those are 1980s or later. There is a 1960s project that apparently managed to accelerate a 400 pound projectile at 32% the delta- required for low earth orbit, but that seems many orders of magnitude less than what you'd need to be useful at all. And that used chemical propulsion, not an EM coil. I'm not seeing any coil gun projects within the 1970s timeframe.

Once the population is living in space and war is a thing of the past, you can strap nuclear power plants onto some of the O'Neil cylinders and send them off into space as starships.

Sure, but artificial gravity doesn't really solve the relevant problems. Yes, by all means use rotating cylinders to make your people more comfortable in transit, but you still need to get those cylinders wherever you're going. I'm pretty sure saturn 5 style rockets could probably get you to Mars and Venus. ...in fact, yes, apparently there were proposals to do just that. 5 launches worth of material into orbit, assemble your craft in space and then fly it to Mars. "No more war" so using former defense budgets to colonize space would probably be plenty to most of the problems simply by throwing money at them until they went away. Even at its peak during the Apollo program NASA's budget has never been even 5% of the federal budget, and it's hovered around 1% for most of NASA's lifetime.

Wow, Project Empire. Proposed 1971 manned Mars/Venus flyby. 396 day mission, 6 man crew, craft would pass within 5000 miles of Venus and within 3000 miles of Mars. No landings, but still, those proposed manned flybys are things we still haven't even attempted today, and we could have done it before most of us reading this post were even born.


Stuff like this is why I started this thread. There's a lot of talk about upcoming technology ushering in a golden era, but I really think we're had the ability to do a lot of these things for a long time. We just chose not to for some reason. President Nixon was trying to get a US basic income program in place back in the 70s, because even then there were concerns that technology was making the "work for money to live" model obsolete. Even in the 60s Apollo era, there were serious proposals to build a moon colony. Projects Daedalus and Orion, also in the 60s were both attempts at serious interstellar craft.

All of this stuff is from before I was even born. Probably most of us. Yet none of it's happened in the fifty years since.

What happened? Why did we lose our collective will?

We could have had Star Trek. Instead we have facebook and american idol.

How did we go so wrong?

[That Wolf]

In the book brave new world the drugs the people are on arnt neccesarily a good route, it was a baby sitter.
Im all for chemical enlightenment but convincing a population is happier on drugs is very..
Aldous is a fucking genius.
Sorry for derailing your last thread Bucket, I didnt intend the emperor name drop or insults to start flying around.

[mainiac]

This "does space stuff" but I'm not sure it's either necessary or a good solution for the problems you address. There's not really any shortage of land here on earth. Maybe there's a shortage of fertile land, or areas with nice climate to next oceans, and so forth, but if those are what you're looking for the moon isn't a very good place to find them.

"Land" on O'Neil cylinders would have a number of advantages over land on earth.  3 dimensions means that everyone can enjoy the proximity to the economic core of prime Manhattan without the crowding.  That cuts down on the geographic separation between the rich and the poor.  Solar panels would be 6 times more efficient (which has an exponential benefit because it means the energy to make more solar panels is cheap) which cuts down on a major expense, maybe 10% of labor.  Once the system is up and going energy and materials are cheap so you dont need to be miserly about building new O'Neil cylinders.

Economic misfortune is all about scarcity.  O'Neil cylinders eliminate many of the prime forms of scarcity that create inequality.  There would still be some political economy challenges because some people would be rich or poor in human capital but those would be much easier to deal with if land wealth isn't a thing and material abundance exists for everyone.  Some economists have theorized that most people are satiated at an annual income of somewhere around 250,000k-1,000,000 and care very little about material consumption past that point.  Those who keep accumulating money past that point do so from competitive instinct and enjoying the lifestyle of capitalism.  If you give someone the equivalent of a first world diet, great transportation and an apartment in downtown Manhattan for a few hours of labor a week then you've basically taken them to their satiation point.  Then you just need to find a fraction of the population that wants to be builders, teachers and doctors to take care of most of the needs of mankind.

I'm not saying it's easy, I'm just saying that it's possible with 1970s technology and would be a post-scarcity society.

What do you mean by this? The gravity advantage would make it relatively easy to fire materials from the moon into an ocean drop, but in your scenario you want those materials on the moon.

Not launching the materials to the surface of the earth, launching them off the surface of the moon for low delta-v transfer to a new orbit like a Lagrange point.

[Antioch]

What would the point be of a manned mars/venus flyby? What can a man in a tin can do from space that a probe can't?

[itisnotlogical]

Say they did it?

[IronyOwl]

Stuff like this is why I started this thread. There's a lot of talk about upcoming technology ushering in a golden era, but I really think we're had the ability to do a lot of these things for a long time. We just chose not to for some reason. President Nixon was trying to get a US basic income program in place back in the 70s, because even then there were concerns that technology was making the "work for money to live" model obsolete. Even in the 60s Apollo era, there were serious proposals to build a moon colony. Projects Daedalus and Orion, also in the 60s were both attempts at serious interstellar craft.

All of this stuff is from before I was even born. Probably most of us. Yet none of it's happened in the fifty years since.

What happened? Why did we lose our collective will?

We could have had Star Trek. Instead we have facebook and american idol.

How did we go so wrong?

Potential is always massively higher than practice. This isn't new or unique to space travel, it's just especially visible if you choose to compare the heights of a dick waving contest to the aimless milling of less competitive pursuits, and especially personal if you choose to wonder what you've been cheated of by nobody having their shit together in the slightest. If everybody had put aside their differences and decided to work together and be nice to each other during ancient Assyria, they could have accomplished pretty much all of the social stuff you're asking for using the miracles of agriculture and worked bronze. Instead they stabbed each other a lot and nailed each other's skins to walls.

Woooo. Go team.

What would the point be of a manned mars/venus flyby? What can a man in a tin can do from space that a probe can't?

Nowadays, not sure. In the 70s, there might have been something.

That said, it is awesome and provides more experience for manned flights in general, which presumably still have uses out there somewhere. Trying to go from launching probe after probe to suddenly carrying live cargo probably wouldn't be as smooth as doing live runs as a matter of course.