What We’ll Do in Space by 2116
nautil.us
nautil.us
My vision of how it could be in [N=no_fucking_clue] decades: Completely unmanned from the beginning (just like mining on earth nearly already is), with a large-scale base on the moon. It starts with mining on the moon that is processed on the moon and shipped to the earth and the infrastructure is set up so that [M] decades later it would be the hub for inerplanetary mining operations as well.
Get building Mr. Musk!
It's very unlikely that SpaceX will be entering the space mining business. Musk doesn't seem to be a big fan of it, except in the context of mining resources on Mars for consumption on Mars.
Let another company (e.g. SpaceX) deal with the transportation. The level of specialisation at every steps is huge.
Put like that it's pretty impressive. A lot of people, including me, tend to focus on humans in space and on other planetary bodies so think look a bit grim from that perspective.
We're doing pretty well exploring our solar system. I wonder how the jump to other solar systems is going to be once we're 'done' here.
We're more likely to upload our minds and run them on a small and energy efficient computing substrate.
After seeding a new solar system with appropriate infrastructure, we can then just transmit ourselves from place to place.
We can reallydo a lot more in our current exploration. Ideally we would have a permanent human presence on the moon and Mars if budgets kept up. Also a good exploration of Europa, Titan and other moons.
As of now we do not have the ability to travel to another solar system in a human lifetime and the technology to do so doesn't even seem possible. No hints at near light speed travel, let alone faster than light.
The tech doesn't exist now, but it could with antimatter propulsion. Basically, you just need to create a large spacecraft which can accelerate continuously at 1g. Then, you point the craft to Alpha Centauri and accelerate at 1g for half the distance, then spin around and decelerate at 1g for the second half. With 1g acceleration, you don't need artificial gravity. And the trip should take less 4 years from what I read here:
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=reb6mf...
The occupants of the trip will actually achieve apparent faster-than-light travel! (Alpha Centauri is almost 5ly distant.) Relativistic dilation at work. Of course, the problem is the huge amount of energy needed. But if they could achieve 0.1g acceleration, it's much less and the trip is still only 13 years; for 0.01g, it's 41 years, still within a human lifetime though a bit much. But that might even be possible with nuclear propulsion.
So, in summary, it's absolutely possible to travel to other star systems within a human lifetime, as far as physics is concerned. However, building antimatter drives and obtaining enough antimatter fuel for the trip seems pretty impractical, and also unlikely that anyone will want to expend the resources to do that. But if you accept much lower acceleration, and combine that with cryogenic technology ("suspended animation") so that people don't need to age during the trip, it might be doable. But it'd be a one-way trip most likely, since everyone the passengers knew on Earth would be dead when they got back, unless of course we eliminate aging.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/solar-system
>Basically, you just need to create a large spacecraft which can accelerate continuously at 1g. Then, you point the craft to Alpha Centauri and accelerate at 1g for half the distance, then spin around and decelerate at 1g for the second half. With 1g acceleration, you don't need artificial gravity. And the trip should take less 4 years from what I read here:
You would need a colossal amount of energy to maintain that acceleration. I would believe 8 years, but the system is already 4 light years away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System From Wikipedia: "This article is about the Sun and its planetary system. For other similar systems, see Star system and Planetary system."
>You would need a colossal amount of energy to maintain that acceleration. I would believe 8 years, but the system is already 4 light years away.
And your belief is wrong. I already gave you a reference. The trip takes less than the distance in light-speed. A trip to the center of the galaxy at even 0.1g acceleration takes far, far less than the lightyear distance, in ship-time.
But as the financial people say, "Past performance is no guarantee of future results".
In our imagination we focus on landing somewhere, but this seems a bit short sighted. We expend all that energy leaving one gravity well to end up at the bottom of another. But the act of living and travelling through space is exploration in its own right and hugely inspirational. And if you do want humans to live on another planet then learning how to function in space is a necessity. Why not focus on making space stations that are as self sustaining as possible?
I disagree very much. Throwing bureaucracy and money at problems does not decrease risk. NASA has killed several astronauts: Challenger (bad internal processes and "go-fever"), Columbia (bad technical concept and design), and Apollo 1. Then there are those near-misses with Apollo 13 and Gemini 8 [1], which could have easily resulted in the loss of the crew. Money and bureaucracy also don't protect from stupid mistakes, as seen in the Mars Climate Orbiter case (output data in wrong units) [2].
Private companies also have a strong incentive to minimize risk to human life, due to all the bad PR and losses in revenue that brings.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_8#Emergency [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
I'm under the very strong impression that works better than a public actor with a public watchdog, we've seen too many examples of common mode failure (politics), the most recent notorious one being Flint's water system. (And as noted by others, private actors have marketplace feedback.)
https://gigaom.com/2012/08/20/nasa-scrubbed-mars-rover-code-...
http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/making_robust_software/
> Private companies also have a strong incentive to minimize risk to human life
There's no evidence of that whatsoever. OSHA, for example, has vastly reduced workplace fatalities and injuries.
Bureaucracy and several layers of subcontractors is not the same as "attention to detail". You can easily have the latter while avoiding the former; I'd even argue that bureaucracy is dangerous in this context, since it maximizes ass-covering and minimizes personal responsibility. Personal responsibility is still the best way to ensure attention to detail.
> There's no evidence of that whatsoever. OSHA, for example, has vastly reduced workplace fatalities and injuries.
My statement was in the context of human space flight. When an astronaut dies during a mission, that will have a massive impact on the company's reputation, unlike some construction site accident. OSHA does not apply to space flight missions.
Compare commercial airplanes: Whenever a plane crashes, you'll be sure to hear about it and which airline it belonged to.
Plane crashes are rare events thanks to the massive bureaucracy known as the FAA.
17 out of ~600 isn't really something to brag about.
A dangerous situations occur when either uses the wrong model. When governments try to turn profits, they may cut something that the perhaps shouldn't (Flint). And when private enterprise spends like a government, ignores the bottom line, they are ripped apart by irate shareholders. It's apples and oranges.
So you can ding NASA for bad choices, which is fair, but there's a private business component in all of that too. It's a public-private venture, space.
a) Chandrayaan-2[1] in 2017. Second lunar mission; this time with a soft lander and rover.
b) Second Mars mission[2] in 2018. More science payloads than the first mission. May have a lander as well.
c) Venus orbiter mission[3] in 2018-2020.
d) Aditya L1[4] solar observatory mission in 2020.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-2
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangalyaan_2
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_orbiter_mission
[4]http://www.isro.gov.in/aditya-l1-first-indian-mission-to-stu...
From the Wikipedia article about the Solar Probe+, it seems the spacecraft should achieve 200km/s as it passes by the Sun. At that speed, a trip to Mercury (57.91 million km) would take 80 hours?
Could someone with more knowledge about space travel weight in on the difficulties of achieving this and/or any glaring mistakes I have made in my assumptions and calculations?
To clarify, I'm interested in how fast we should ship super advanced robots to these planets. So things like human survival while it passes by the Sun aren't important in this case (I think? Is melting a huge problem for shipping robots that way?).
The other problem is since 200km/s is the fastest speed, you have to get to that point at the normal one.
If you read the Wikipedia article more closely (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Probe_Plus) you'll note that it takes seven flybys of Venus over the course of six years to get into that orbit, and the resulting orbit has an 88 day period.
Plus, if you want to do anything more than whiz past Mercury, you need to bleed off that 200km/s speed to orbital velocity, which takes an enormous amount of fuel.
The Mariner 10 trip did it in 5 months, which is reasonable. The article doesn't mention Mercury at all. A minimum-fuel trip to Mars is estimated at 3 years, I believe.
Wikipedia:
> Another reason why so few missions have targeted Mercury is that it is very difficult to obtain a satellite orbit around the planet on account of its proximity to the Sun, which causes the Sun’s gravitational field to pull on any satellite that would be set into Mercury's orbit. Furthermore, spacecraft naturally accelerate as they approach the greater gravitational pull of the Sun, but must slow down for orbit insertion, so this entails considerable fuel requirements. This is different with superior planets beyond Earth’s orbit where the satellite works against the pull of the Sun. Therefore, reaching an orbit around Mercury requires especially expensive rocketry. Mercury's lack of an atmosphere poses further challenges because it precludes aerobraking or the use of a parachute type device.[3] Thus a landing mission would have even more demanding fuel requirements.
Here's the path we actually used to send an orbiter to Mercury. Interestingly, it did a bit of solar sailing to make some fine adjustments to its trajectory by angling its sun shield.
http://www.theplanetstoday.com/messenger_flight_path.html
More direct transfers are possible, but they require more dV on the spacecraft, and the rocket equation means increasing dV increases the ratio of fuel mass to craft mass exponentially.
Yes, you can reach mercury quite quickly, but in order to land on it (or get captured into its orbit) you need to match its speed and its direction of travel. (speed and direction together are velocity, remember).
It's like I'm a stuntman jumping from one car to another on the freeway. If one car is going 60mph and one is going 20 mph it's going to end badly.
You'll start with a certain velocity on earth, and end up with a target velocity when you reach your destination. That's the delta-v. The type of rocket and how much propellant you have determine the delta-v.
Once you've made your rocket burn, you just have to wait until your paths cross. So, that's why it can take a long time for these missions. That's why people always talk about a journey time of 235 days to mars.
This is not the only possible way to do it though, it just uses the least fuel. If you're willing to use a lot more fuel, you can speed things up significantly, but generally we don't do that.
http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-europa-mission-begi...
We should be there within the next 10 to 15 years.
I'd say there is more than a chance, the amount of technology that was produced during the "space-race" is incredible - I personally think that an emphasis on space exploration would continue that advancement.
Take any 100-year period of time over the last few centuries. It's not just that folks in one period of time would not understand the activities of the next period, they wouldn't even understand the concepts involved So horseback folks really didn't grok riverboat steam power at all. Same goes for railroads. Or aviation.
That leads me to believe that what's up next is something we currently think impossible or silly. "Field propulsion" is a nice moniker for that, whatever in reality it turns out to be.
Yes I agree that's likely but for very different reasons from what is said in the article:
"Since the retirement of the US Space Shuttle in 2011, only Russia and China have maintained human spaceflight capability with the Soyuz program and Shenzhou program."[1]
After a whole paragraph describing how difficult it is, this seems rather optimistic. Give or Take? Give another 100, I'd guess.
- Make industrial-scale self-reproducing robots, and send them to an asteroid. - Build more robots out of that asteroid, send robots to next nearest asteroid. - Build a ringworld out of asteroid and robot parts.
The great thing about space being so enormously big, is that .. once you get off Earth .. you've got so much of it to play with. Send some of these robots to the rings of Saturn, get as much water together as possible, take your fish-tank and get on with it ..
We have the technology to do this. We truly do.
We just don't have the will.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#Vo...
http://www.markuskayser.com/work/solarsinter/
Locate richest mineral resource in near-Earth neighborhood. Apply rockets. Build new rockets.
I know, it is 'just a fantasy', but .. y'know .. it was once 'just a fantasy' that we'd all have Internet terminals glued to our heads, and look how fast we got that one, once the will-power was there ..
We're not even close to being able to make self-reproducing robots.
Even a simple robot requires a huge supply chain. Take, say, the photoresists used in chip manufacture -- that's an entire chemical industry that you need to box up. That little industry has a bunch of needs on its own. Okay, box those up, too. Repeat. Now let's do insulation for wires . . . or batteries.
It takes a lot more than a village to make a robot, it pretty much takes a country. Probably several, given how suitable raw materials are so inconveniently spread around (and often, hard to find, so I guess we need to add some kind of prospecting facility now).
Short of general-purpose nano-assemblers, which are likely to remain science fiction for quite some time, you'll not put a self-reproducing robot into a probe-sized package any time soon.
But absent "nanotech" or "micro-mechanical biotech" or some similar game-changing advance, self-replicating machines will need to incorporate self-replication of so much of their technology base that they will basically look like factories. Now, there's nothing wrong with a self-replicating factory, but it's not portable and cuddly, and you can't stick it on a rocket and launch it (not in one piece, anyway).
I would be delighted to be proven wrong.
[EDIT: added quote, made it clear that it was the third book in a sequence that was canned]
[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/psa-why-...
Look at 2001: A Space Odyssey for example. In 1969, it looked like a fairly reasonable prediction of what things would be like in 2001 (42 years away), given the rate of change at the time in aerospace technology. By 1974, it still didn't look too bad. It didn't start looking overly optimistic until probably the late 80s, 20 years later.
Also, if Stross is one of those writers who makes multi-book story arcs spanning over a decade (like Herbert did with the Dune series), that's a sure recipe for total failure when doing near-term sci-fi. Stuff just changes too fast; Herbert's stuff worked sorta-Ok because Dune was set 8000 years in the future (IIRC), but even there one big premise was the idea of genetic memories, which were postulated when he started, but eventually disproven with greater knowledge of genetics, probably before he finished his last book.
This is stuff like Blade Runner worked well: it was a singular story, set about 35 years into the future. At the time, it looked like a somewhat reasonable depiction of 35 years in the future, though rather grim. Of course, now it's almost 2017 and things don't look anything like that, so it's interesting to watch from a historical perspective. It is a little disturbing that they now want to milk it with a sequel after all this time, when obviously things aren't going to look anything like that in 1 year, but I guess I can ignore it like I ignore the Matrix sequels.
However, consider how much of our current approach to designing spacefaring robots and their subsystems is influenced by the materials and economic climate we have available here on earth. We deal with severe tradeoffs guided by making robots as lightweight as possible, as reliable as possible (because one failed servo is extremely expensive to replace once you're on mars) and use highly modular components which are well-suited to an expansive global supply chain. What do you design differently when heavy metals are relatively plentiful, weight is mostly irrelevant, scrapping a failed robot is more acceptable and organic substances are scarce? If the parts of the robot are made almost entirely using additive manufacturing processes and circuitry is integrated into the structure you can reduce or remove the need for fasteners and possibly do without conventional insulated sheathing, etc.
The path to self-replication is to reconsider and reinvent a technology stack which minimizes the set of dependencies, and that is a very interesting challenge.
If you can produce 99% of a robot's mass from materials available in space (on the moon or some asteroid), with 1% of the mass consisting of the most complex ingredients provided by Earth (such as the chips you mentioned), you can effectively launch 100x the number of robots from earth at the same cost.
Once you have a couple of thousand relatively flexible robots, you can start to get serious about building specialized labs producing more complex ingredients in space, and then scale up from there.
Even then the task is ridiculously complex, and it seems unlikely that the economics of it would work either[1], but it can nevertheless be much simpler than you make it sound. In any case, we should try to get there because any significant step towards this goal will also make life on earth more robust.
[1] E.g. in the example of chips, good luck getting the masks for advanced designs, let alone all the implicit know-how that goes into a modern fab.
I'm not sure we do. Space fabrication is a business we've only just started in. We've done IKEA-in-space to make the ISS, and we're just about at the stage of growing veg on it. We've experimented with sintering of lunar dust on earth. That's really about it. We've not manufactured so much as a bolt in actual space, let alone built the IC fabrication infrastructure that would be required for robots.
Of course, that movie had some other really serious problems: it seemed to assume that there was artificial gravity, but that it only worked inside the station, and stopped at the roof (so when a guy is walking around inside a tunnel, he's at Earth-normal gravity, but when another guy is making an ambush for him on the outside roof of this tunnel, he's in microgravity).
Nuclear propulsion has offered high-Isp and high-thrust together in the same engine since the 60s[1], but for various reasons it hasn't flown. With the right safety precautions, public perception, legal changes, and luck, this could be the "breakthrough" you're looking for.
What about ion thrusters? They are known and it's not a revolution but rather evolution of technology that's needed to make them more useful.
Most science fiction assumes that humans will survive long duration space travel through chemical induced sleep, waking up only when they are about to reach the destination.
Is it just science fiction or do we have someone working aggressively on this.
Although I guess you could wake people up every 3 months for some muscle replenishment exercise and mission updates.
TL;DR: "No chance"
http://www.msha.gov/stats/centurystats/mnmstats.asp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Labor_Wars
"all the bad PR and losses in revenue that brings" is insufficient.
logicchains is suggesting that "private mining companies kill lots of people" says more about dangerous versus safe industries, than it does about private versus public companies.
As to your second point: apparently you neither read the fine Wikipedia article nor followed up on any of the references provided.
Here, read just the two first paragraphs of this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
and you may become satisfied that, without restraint, some private employers will kill their employees.
It seems this site has a serious infestation of rightwing cranks.
We must remember that depriving families of income doesn't help them; it is not as if children are sent to work to further enrich their wealthy parents. If you want to help poor children who have to work, please give them money and opportunities, and do not deprive them of the best of their (poor set of) options.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/citizenship/stru...
>We must remember that depriving families of income doesn't help them
I believe similar arguments were made in favour of slavery. That didn't work out so well either.
The best way to not deprive families of income is to... not deprive families of income.
It's an unusual world view that suggests that not working their children to death somehow gets in the way of this.
>">We must remember that depriving families of income doesn't help them
I believe similar arguments were made in favour of slavery. That didn't work out so well either. The best way to not deprive families of income is to... not deprive families of income."
I am not an expert on slavery, but I don't think the main problem was parents having their children work to earn money for the household... and I'm not sure how you could interpret my point as being one in favor of slavery.
>">The best way to not deprive families of income is to... not deprive families of income.
It's an unusual world view that suggests that not working their children to death somehow gets in the way of this."
If you want to free children from dreadful toil and danger, you should do so by helping them and their families (through charity, and by personally helping them), rather than by restricting them to further poverty. Saying someone can't have a job doesn't make them rich, and being self-righteous about it doesn't help either.
Voluntary charity has not solved the problem of poverty. That's old Ayn Rand nonsense, and she was wrong about a great many things. In the end, she cashed her Social Security checks. And good for her, she was entitled to them.
It's becoming fashionable on the right to deny the "veil of ignorance" and instead embrace inheritance of class as if it's a genetic trait. I sometimes wonder if the right pines for the great old days of primogeniture too. For now, it still takes a sovereign to get some people who have enough marbles to share their toys so others can live.
I am not a Randian, but there is nothing wrong with taking benefits from a system which had (in her view) wronged her. If I steal some things you need, then offer you some of them back, acceptance of my offer is not tantamount to forgiveness, and does not condone or justify my behaviour.
I am no Rawlsian, and the 'veil of ignorance' assumes that everyone would agree if only they were not self-interested; the only problem with this is that it's not true. There is much more variance of moral belief within each class/gender/nationality/race than across them.
There's a substantive point to be made here, but since you didn't make it, this comment probably should have been edited down to nothing.
I wasn't downvoting in this thread.
And, by the way, thereby doubly proved the pejorative used previously was very much the right one.
Your first reference is pretty useless, since it doesn't show fatalities in relation to total man-hours worked. If anything, it would indicate that companies have become less inclined to accept human deaths!
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-be...
Edit: By which I mean a recent example of a company that doesn't give a stuff about protecting people over profits.
Predictions of the future are supposed to inspire and bewilder