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[mainiac]

The problem is that you need to launch this submarine into space. And another 20 submarines for growing food. Metaphor aside, what I'm saying is that you'd need lots of heavy equipment to maintain atmosphere needed for both the residents and the gardens that feed them.

No, you build the greenhouses in space out of the space dust, all you need is power and you've got glass.

I was unfamiliar with any heavy equipment that was needed to make a greenhouse work.

Silicon is not the only component of high efficiency PV panels, the good ones are doped with rare heavy metals.

Yes, but you don't need top of the line.  Doping them with more mundane materials would work very well in the better environment.

I am not assuming any significant technological breakthroughs. Solar thermal is a proven technology, frictionless magnetic bearings are well known, and theoretically we don't even need material stronger than steel.

None of the things you said have been done before.  Therefore they are speculative technologies.  Plenty of thingthat seemed like a good idea before they were built never planned out, particularly in aeronautics.''

[Maggarg - Eater of chicke]

Feudalism II: The Lower Classes are All Superfluous(Also Spaceships) style societies.

I would totally play that if that was a game.

[Nadaka]

Solar thermal power and hydrolysis to create clean rocket fuel have very much been done before. The theory, much engineering and small scale prototypes behind active magnetic launchers have been done. Far more than with self replicating machines or sustaining humans in an tiny enclosed environment.

[mainiac]

]Far more than with self replicating machines or sustaining humans in an tiny enclosed environment.

Self replicating machines no but humans in an enclosed environment has been done for decades.  And nobody said the environment should be tiny.  The nice thing about space is you've got tons of room to pitch your tent.

[Nadaka]

]Far more than with self replicating machines or sustaining humans in an tiny enclosed environment.

Self replicating machines no but humans in an enclosed environment has been done for decades.  And nobody said the environment should be tiny.  The nice thing about space is you've got tons of room to pitch your tent.

But you have neither the material to make the tent, nor the machinery to harvest the material.

There is no magical pill to get that into orbit until you have access to sufficient launch capacity by building the infrastructure on earth first.

[GlyphGryph]

We are a long, long way from running out of the ability to take advantage of earth bound solar power. And by expanding earths energy capacity first, we open the option of reducing the long term cost of launching material into space by using active structures like rail guns, launch loops, space fountains or other methods.

Nadaka, I find it hilarious that you are using the exact same arguments the oil barons used to keep us on oil for the last 60 years to decry the potential benefits of space. Not to say you're wrong, I just wonder if you understand that.

[counting]

I want to derailed a little by pointing that the most efficient of harvesting is as close to the sun as possible. So many sifi writers doesn't place the energy output factories on the Moon, but rather on Mercury. It's closer to the Sun, as small as the Moon which easy to lunch materials on it. And energy transferring using microwave doesn't need to be close to Earth at all, there is almost no energy lost when transmit concentrate beam of electromagnetic waves through empty space.   

[GlyphGryph]

Mercury provides problems of its own, however, and isn't really feasible without a closer station of some sort to launch that project from.

[The Scout]

We are a long, long way from running out of the ability to take advantage of earth bound solar power. And by expanding earths energy capacity first, we open the option of reducing the long term cost of launching material into space by using active structures like rail guns, launch loops, space fountains or other methods.

Nadaka, I find it hilarious that you are using the exact same arguments the oil barons used to keep us on oil for the last 60 years to decry the potential benefits of space. Not to say you're wrong, I just wonder if you understand that.

But the oil barons are greedy companies, using that to get money. He's some random guy/girl on the internet.
In a real world, this wouldn't work. It's much cheaper to put massive amounts of solar panels on Earth, then a few on the moon.
Getting a fully closed habitat on the moon is also almost impossible. Getting that stuff up there, would take several trips with our technology.
That would cost the government doing that large amounts of money, and that the stuff might not make it till the next trip.
And solar flares putting lethal doses of radiation into you, and frying electrical equipment.
Just my opinion.
Don't hurt me.

[Maggarg - Eater of chicke]

It's still important to go out into space, I think. I dont like the idea of one world, one graveyard.

[Nadaka]

We are a long, long way from running out of the ability to take advantage of earth bound solar power. And by expanding earths energy capacity first, we open the option of reducing the long term cost of launching material into space by using active structures like rail guns, launch loops, space fountains or other methods.

Nadaka, I find it hilarious that you are using the exact same arguments the oil barons used to keep us on oil for the last 60 years to decry the potential benefits of space. Not to say you're wrong, I just wonder if you understand that.

I do realize that, I suppose it is a little funny. I am not actually decrying the potential benefits of space at all. I am just saying that getting to space in any significant way is a HARD problem, one that can only be solved by investing heavily in the infrastructure on earth first. When we have 7 billion people living as well and as productively as the western world, when we are producing 5+ times our current global energy output from solar , then the problem of getting into space becomes significantly less hard.

[Maggarg - Eater of chicke]

This is my concept of space travel thanks to this thread.

It still has the propellor in case it lands in a sea.

[Starver]

There isn't a need to [keep the solar panel] pointed at the sun.

Actually, there still is, although it is much easier to do.


I was going to mention Space Elevators, but Maggarg has already done so.  Some engineering problems to sort out.  Including over-engineering in order to deal with some of the more obvious dangers from the more obvious failure conditions.  (And then some more thought about how to deal with the less obvious dangers... indeed, what the less obvious dangers might be!)

There's a trilogy of books that includes a failure of a non-Terran space elevator system, but to namecheck it would be a spoiler for those not yet having read the series.  There are more than enough trilogies that might well qualify against all that I have deigned to describe, and so it causes me absolutely no grief mentioning these bare bones.


Obviously, space elevators are themselves going to take effort to make, so we need to continue with both materials science and space science in order to be able to hoist up the spool of appropriate material (or the means to produce it while up there, from hoisted or captured materials), possibly gather in a suitable counterweight asteroid (if not relying upon accretion of various bits of space-junk onto the hoisting-mission left-overs), and then after the original tether is made taught (from ground to geosynchronous station to counterweight) use whatever we've just created to spin further threads up and down from to create something suitable for heavy lifting purposes.


Though I must admit that the last time I seriously engaged in discussions with various parties (some 'merely' space-interested, some actually space-professionals!) about this kind of project, it was... 1990, I think, so I might be a couple of decades behind in the thinking.  IIRC, "carbon nanotubes" were still a little hypothetical (or very recently confirmed), although I've fairly certain that significant lengths of them (by human scale, never mind orbital ones) remain so to this day.

I think one of the other ideas at that time (that could, even at the time, have been made with existing metal wire technologies) was to have a series of tether-type vehicles in various orbits, spinning two 'arms' of chord around their barycentre as they orbit, such that a high-flying vehicle (e.g. one of these new-fangled Scaled Composites/SpaceShipOne-style craft, lifting to "space, but not orbit") could rendezvous with the lower spinning arm, attach and be dragged up further before being slung onto a meeting with a higher-orbiting construct of a similar nature, and perhaps a further slingshot or two after that...

The slingshot-sats, themselves, would lose orbital altitude in turn (though could be provided with the mass to reduce the amount of loss and allow proportionally more in the slung-ship's gain), but by using solar power to send a given current along the tether, as it moves through the Earth's magnetic field, it could regain its altitude without the need for reaction mass.  Not sure if that idea is still in vogue, or not.


On the case for colonisation[1], I'm of the "eggs in one basket" school.  (i.e., don't keep them all there!)  I'm unfortunately nowhere on track to become space-borne by any common contemporary route (test pilot, practical scientist of significant note or billionaire) and would probably have to work to pass the physicals in the event I get the chance to be lofted upwards in any lucky-dip approach (e.g. the path that the likes of Christa McAuliffe got, conveniently stepping around the fact that this meant she was involved in that particular disaster), but I'm currently more than willing to put up with the risk that having non-terrestrial colonies out there might mean someone (colonial, or an interested party down here who knows the colonies can continue in their stead) is more willing to endanger the planet, because humanity will eventually find itself in a situation where having someone 'out there' means either that they continue as a species, on our behalf, even when the Big One comes and brings us to our knees (if not lower), or that we actually have some people handily situated out there (and at least partially experienced enough) that can quickly get in there and avert certain disaster with a good and steady but sustained nudge.  (Or paint half the thing white, if that's the solution...)


PS Lagrange Points.  Particularly L1.  That's where I'd put the solar array.  Not so far away from Earth, but closer to the sun, and stable in the direction of the orbital path and perpendicular to the orbital plane, even if it needs a little effort to keep steady in the sunward/earthward direction.  And unless it was a tag larger than the Earth itself it wouldn't cast significant shadow (although I don't see why something couldn't also be set up to make it double up as large-scale sun-shade that could block a few percent of the Sun's light, if required, to help buffer against whatever rampant greenhouse effect might be occurring in the near-future decades that it gets built in[3].

PPS.  I keep getting "while you were typing" messages, and now Maggarg's ninjaed me again with the "one graveyard" comment!  Post, darn you, post!

PPPS.  Forgot to say, Nuclear submarines with Eden Project strapped on?  Reminds me of Silent Running.

[1] Sorry, I stick to this English spelling as a force of habit in the case of just about every instance of interchangable -ise/ize words and their derivatives.  The exceptions mainly being generally along the lines of Sid Meier's various games given that they are names with the zed[2]-like spelling.

[2] "Zee", if you wish.

[3] Especially if the availability of "unbounded electrical energy" also ends up contributing to global warming, by a slightly indirect route...   Not that I've done the maths regarding that, but could it be something to consider..?

[Duke 2.0]

 I would like to see examples of versatile self replicating robots. I have seen people develop fabricators that can mostly create other fabricators that can mostly create other fabricators, but nothing advanced enough to make equipment necessary to harvest resources and refine them into materials tha could be used to make other machines.

 I personally like the X-prize method of doing things. Offer a prize to private companies for the development of space technologies. When the costs of getting into space get low enough for private companies to care costs for making payloads up there will lower. Then these optimistic fantasies about the profit of space rocks will be put to the test.

[counting]

Good to find someone also like text wall.