The sci-fi cities of Bezos’s Blue Origin derive from his teacher Gerard O’Neill
citylab.com
citylab.com
— Frederic Jameson
Though based on my experiences on HN, even some people here need this really bashed into their heads, that we can't hurt ecosystems that don't exist. ("What if some do?" Then by all means worry about them, but by resources, they are a fraction of a fraction of a percent of what the universe has.) There is a major unexamined assumption that people have that life exists everywhere, and therefore we can't put a toe outside our planet without stomping on something, simply because that's our Earth-based experience. Once brought to the conscious level it's obvious that it's false, but it's hard to get it up to that level for some people.
again, no sense of proportion of the actual issue here. we are DESTROYING the earth, not mildly scratching it etc.
establishing a space society is a hugely intensive operation that dwarfs the hundreds of millions required to put a few folks and some trinkets into a space station etc.
One currently sees the opposite of top-down coordination of space activities, after an initial cold-war-inspired display of bravado etc. (private ventures contracted to life public sector payloads into orbit) and you can be assured that plenty of both consumption of earths resources and pollution of earths atmosphere and water occur as byproducts. Private enterprise would seem to offer a "willy nilly" approach to anything, as such.
I don't think the lack of a dictator--especially the sort of dictator you would support--is one of our problems!
These folks appear to avoid current events like the plague. Jeff Bezos is still highly involved in assisting the US government and it's various military and intelligence entities in seeking advantage versus other nations.
Taking nationalist ignorant policies and mentalities with us into space seems... retrograde, stupid, and doomed to failure. Inelegant.
There is a reason that all seriously futuristic sci-fi puts us WELL beyond this petty nationalist nonsense currently causing people to re-re-visit the 1980's yet again...
Only for very, very particular definitions of "Earth". There are numerous events in Earth's past that by any objective standard are more destructive than even the worst possible interpretations of man's efforts to date and worst plausible projections of man's efforts in the future. To pick one that probably doesn't even come to your mind, nothing we've done is even within two factors of magnitude of the disaster of the Great Oxygenation Crisis. Probably three, maybe even four. That one was bad. Well, bad at the time, anyhow; certainly none of us would today prefer that it had never happened.
That we're doing various dangerous and bad things is undeniable. That we're "DESTROYING" the Earth is a memetic weapon that has been crafted and fired at you by people who want you to give them lots of power to fix the DESTRUCTION of Earth, and to ensure that you stay in their control by ensure that anyone who disagrees with that assessment has the human instinctual "religious heretic" template applied to them, so you don't apply rational thought. Things are bad, but not so bad that you need that much despair.
That said, I don't expect us to lift industry into space. I expect us to lift an industrial seed into space that grows there, and that ultimately not all that many people will necessarily leave Earth.
I also expect that the current situation will not persist indefinitely. If we have clean energy, and look at how that is developing lately, lifting things into space isn't necessarily that big a deal. A "environmentally neutral" launch platform isn't even remotely inconceivable; it's not terribly out of reach today. The question isn't about the technology of 2019; the question is about the technology of 2069.
I think it is likely (20% or greater) we will compete for resources against non-terrestrial lifeforms before humans leave the solar system, assuming we leave the solar system.
Earth doesn't contain the majority of all water in the solar system. Earth might not even contain all of the liquid water in the solar system. What are the chances that liquid water exists in Ceres' core, or under the icey surface of Europa or Ganymede or another moon? What are the chances that Martian ice, or Europa ice, or Saturn's ice have microbes frozen in them, possibly able to thaw given better environmental conditions? We might even find life in places without water, such as Titan's methane lakes. Titan has a methane cycle very similar to Earth's water cycle. Methane makes a great rocket fuel. Water makes great rocket fuel and is necessary to life support systems.
We have a history of taking what we want without regards to the consequences or whom it hurts. If we don't compete with other life when we leave Earth it's because other life isn't out there, not because of our strong morale core.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PIA17046_-_Voyager_1_Goes...
I am making the assumption that we will have a much stronger preference for water closer to Earth, and we aren't talking about large gravity wells.
If you want to believe that, fine, but be aware you're believing despite a complete lack of evidence. There's little more than a faint trace of a sign of any life in the rest of the solar system (a few stray whiffs of methane on Mars that aren't that hard to explain geologically), and absolutely no sign of any sort of life that would provide any sort of competition if we decided we wanted their resources.
There's also no story of humanity where there is no ecosystem in the first place.
I think the hazard isn't in stomping on an exo-Earth ecosystem.
I think it's that if we can't avoid damage to multi-billion year evolved, robust ecosystems on our home planet, we might not successfully craft off-planet ecosystems that will sustain us indefinitely.
We need maybe like 100 million or less people total on the planet. And 7 or 70 or heck 700 billion littered through the rest of the solar system. The chances of the survival of our species and life in general on the planet the would be infinitely greater than what we have done in the past 300 years. Population growth outside the planet raises absolutely no questions about the survival of the planet or species. The rest of the solar system is already completely and utterly dead as far as we know. No arguments about pollution or stability or sustainability or survival apply to it.
The rest of the universe as far as we know is our canvas, but please spare the damn planet from where we came. It's rare and nearly impossible to replace.
We are utterly destroying the only known home to life forms in the universe. We are doing it rapidly.
You seem to be living in a delusional parallel reality in which establishing a space society doesn't consume the resources of our ONLY current home planet and doesn't pollute it.
We must change our ideologies, our thought patterns, our cultures, and our entire industrial societies patterns and habits (not to mention energy source) within the next decades to survive, let alone thrive or develop further.
I don't get the sense that you comprehend our actual condition on this planet. There is a very very steep footprint curve with regards to both our population (There was roughly 1.5 billion of us the last time we all tried to kill each other, World War 2. Now there are 7 billion of us. Before, the consumption footprint of a person was rather low, now each person consumes more resources than ever before, and this amount of consumption continues to rise. The Chinese middle class will surely want every accessory their American counterparts have, right?)
How has this entire predicament avoided your scrutiny until now?
If anyone's living in a delusional parallel reality, it's you and your apocalyptic rantings.
Not on the first go. So we should start early.
I think that learning how to craft off-planet ecosystems is a large part of what is going to help us stem damage down here. Where would solar power be now without the early adopters in the space industry?
And so...?
Even if true, that doesn't lead anywhere. If you're trying to faintly imply we shouldn't try, you ought to bring the arguments up to the surface, where examination will quite likely show they don't have that much substance.
If only there was a large spinning habitat in space where the megarich could use their money to create a paradise for its inhabitants...
On an orbital colony, there are life maintaining systems and it's probable that people will have different ideas how much they would require maintenance.
Likewise, there will be limited resources and probably again people will have different ideas on what to spend on the short term. Ie a kid would like ice cream but the parents know they could starve before the next harvest so better to spend that energy on some more efficient food.
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry...
From- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT
>A review article in The Lancet states, "research has shown that exposure to DDT at amounts that would be needed in malaria control might cause preterm birth and early weaning ... toxicological evidence shows endocrine-disrupting properties; human data also indicate possible disruption in semen quality, menstruation, gestational length, and duration of lactation."[38]
>Other studies document decreases in semen quality among men with high exposures (generally from IRS).[88]
>Studies are inconsistent on whether high blood DDT or DDE levels increase time to pregnancy.[65] In mothers with high DDE blood serum levels, daughters may have up to a 32% increase in the probability of conceiving, but increased DDT levels have been associated with a 16% decrease in one study.[89]
>Indirect exposure of mothers through workers directly in contact with DDT is associated with an increase in spontaneous abortions[87]
>Other studies found that DDT or DDE interfere with proper thyroid function in pregnancy and childhood.[65][90] Mothers with high levels of DDT circulating in their blood during pregnancy were found to be more likely to give birth to children who would go on to develop autism.[91][92]
There are other less toxic alternatives to DDT for mosquito control and Rachel Carson helped open our eyes to the fact that they are needed.
Somehow, this got translated into; 'Carson got DDT banned and all malaria deaths are her fault'. This is despite the fact that where there are mosquitos we are still using DDT.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/rachel_carsons_critics_keep_o...
Disclaimer: I don't know anything about this particular issue.
I firmly believe in space colonization, but I also firmly believe in realizing things, not just pushing propaganda or fantasy (sometimes with ulterior motives). O'Neill cylinders as a panacea are just that, as far as I can tell (I admit I haven't seen any objective analysis on it; my total guess calculation would put it at say $20M/person absolute minimum for a large city of say 1M persons -- which would be several times the US economy or the assets of a large number of most valuable companies combined).
We just can't not fix Earth. There's no alternative. I've studied quite a bit about Mars colonization (and have my own thoughts about colonizing other places -- in particular I find underground habitats in Mercury intriguing), and it is quite clearly a project for the end of the century at least. Even when the soil, the gravity, and the materials are all more or less at your disposal, it's still extremely difficult to kick start a quasi-self-sustaining manufacturing base, even less one capable of producing exports and growing rapidly. The cost constants per inhabitant are very high.
Like anyone else, I think we need to move off this planet as soon as feasible. But we need a real vision, and we need to do it in a way that makes us truly more resillient and further reaching -- that is, we need colonies to be self-sustaining to the point of surviving catastrophe on other colonies without themselves disappearing -- this is the truly worthwhile goal I believe we need to pursue.
Imaginary space cities relying thousands of billionaires / millions of millionaires spending all wealth on are not that.
Heck, I even believe in Interstellar colonization in the not-too-distant future.
See also, other strategies for ensuring human survival:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17646897
(Underground habitats on Earth)
It isn't humanity's fault that it can expand into and create its own environment suitable for propagating into. We shouldn't allow ourselves to perish into extinction if we have any other option. There is no more moral grounds for the intentional mass-murder of the human species than there is for the intentional destruction of any other species.
If people have tried humanity and are actually advocating its demise, I'd have to ask upon what grounds humanity had been found more wanting than plants or any other species known to have caused mass extinctions throughout known history. If humanity deserves to die, I think we should offer to allow the most ardent of species mass-suicide to go first.
- George Carlin
Getting resources from the moon seems out-of-date these days because the moon is far away in terms of energy even if it is close in distance. Getting resources from asteroids makes more sense.
As for Reagan and Thatcher I don't see either one as oriented toward growth, but rather oriented towards a "war against inflation" that involved higher interest rates, austerity, and tolerance for a lower rate of GDP growth so long as the pain was felt by the middle and below. Reagan might have had sharper rhetoric against environmentalism, but the movement did not collapse until the Clinton years.
When I've been envisioning space colonies lately it has been really large structures; I am fascinated by the idea that you can build a "small ringworld" where the rotation holds in the air with a scale size of a megameter or so, particularly if you can keep the upper atmosphere cold.
The rotation speeds of such a thing are close to orbital velocity and the material requirements are similar to that of a space elevator... Unless you can construct an orbital-velocity bearing in which case you can build a belt around it to reinforce it.
Even then it is hard to build room for any vertical relief into the budget, no high mountains, no deep oceans, probably you get a rather uncomfortable hydrological cycle.
It would probably look different from one of those O'Neil colonies since you'd have a very blue sky and most of the things that look different from a planet would be far away and would look small. A lot depends on if the z-axis of the colony is long or short.
The general idea for ONeil cylinders has been to build them in Moon-Earth Lagrange points with lunar material launched by solar powered electromagnetic mass drivers.
So the distance from Moon is not really an issue.
Halo orbits around Moon-Earth and Sun-Earth L1 and L2 make a lot more sense because they are energetically cheap to get to. L4 and L5 are a ghetto.
Tech like the mass drivers can move material from the asteroid belts in more cheaply than it can from the lunar surface. You also have to consider what it costs to stop the projectiles when they get where they are going (one reason to use the Earth-Moon L1 because you can hit it with nearly no excess velocity)
You're right about raw energy, but one advantage of the moon is that you can build electromagnetic mass drivers that can sling raw material into orbit without affecting the natural orbit of the body (technically you are but only negligibly). For asteroids, you probably have to haul the whole thing back into Earth orbit for it to be useful, and you'd probably have to use some kind of propellant.
Also asteroid missions have much longer timelines if you have to go all the way out to the belt to get them. Less so if you get a near-earth rock, but those missions are pretty complex if trying it in Kerbal Space Program is any indication, and getting it wrong can be catastrophic. Many countries might not take too kindly to people wanting to sling city-destroying rocks around. Moon seems safer in that sense as a first option.
The two aren't mutually exclusive of course, and there are advantages to both. I imagine we'll see both strategies employed in a variety of different ways.
Is there anything fundamentally holding us back from building one right now? I mean there's the obvious problem that nobody has a good reason to build one, and only a hand full of entities have the funding to do so. But the engineering challenges seem to be on the level of building LHC or ITER: not nessesarily easy, but very doable.
For a small-ish cylinder that might be enough. For a cylinder that's multiple kilometers long we would want to do asteroid mining and rockets engineered to bring stuff up cheaply (at the expense of loosing a few rockets, loosing dirt is a lot more acceptable than loosing billion dollar satellites).
There is still signifficant air drag in LEO that would get it down rather quickly, ruining someones day on the surface.
Being close in time is still a factor for manned missions when starting out. If something goes very wrong, rescue is only a few days away.
Like a stellar breakdown service, always in the area
Besides, a few days/weeks is a better response time than a few months.
And there's really a limited size of an asteroid belt cluster you could get. If you start from Ceres and go a few hundred (even dozen!) meters either towards or away from the sun to reach another nearby asteroid, that asteroid has a completely different orbital velocity and will not line up with Ceres again until either it or Ceres completes another full revolution. That means you have to be in essentially the same orbit and travel either clockwise or counterclockwise, which is most efficiently done by making a more eccentric orbit (so your aphelion is the same as Ceres' but your perihelion is lower, or alternatively your perihelion is the same as Ceres' but your aphelion is higher) and then readjusting once you reach the target. But even this maneuver requires going the long way around the sun. Similarly if you want to go up or down relative to your orbital plane (i.e. change inclination).
If you want a cluster of bodies in space that stays relatively the same distance from each other, you have to have a smallish orbital system. The Earth/Moon system is one of these, and it's going to be a lot more feasible to capture near-Earth asteroids and stash them in Earth orbit than to try and find a meaningful cluster of belt asteroids that actually stay close together over the long term.
Assume we invented engines that could manage that delta V in half an hour. If my math is right, if you wanted enough 'fire departments' to reach every asteroid within one hour, you'd need about 67,000 of them, and you'd have to figure out how to pull that delta V without running into any other asteroids (probably out of the ecliptic?)
The good news is your paramedics would only pull about .8Gs which, while perfectly comfortable for earthers would still be tolerable for belters. My point is that if you try to decrease the number of stations to, say, 100, you're going to turn any human occupants into a fine mist in the process.
Ok, here’s some more math. The average distance between asteroids in the belt is apparently over twice as far as the moon. The moon is still very far away for us. There will be no rescues for a very long time and remember that humans die at 10Gs, so when I say very long time I’m not just talking about faster rockets. I’m talking about basic research in human physiology.
More NASA videos and The Expanse for you, less Star Trek.
This is not exactly true. Arguably, it's half false. In any case, this is more nuanced than what you state. There may be some humans who die at 10G. Prolonged exposure to high G might increase the death toll. People could be maintained at 10G unconscious, if they are in the right position, on the right kind of couch.
Humans have survived much higher G loads.
Regardless, if people can survive 20Gs that still only doubles your range. And since we are discussing a category error of orders of magnitude, my point still stands.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86JAU3w9mB8
There are more recent designs which use solar panels and LEDs for lighting, which allows for the use of entirely stationary radiation shielding.
It has been scanned ( https://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75SummerStudy/s.s.doc.html ) but a quick click around didn't show any of the cool paintings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colon...
For instance, if a micro-meteor created a bullet-sized hole in the International Space Station, it would take 5-10 minutes for the air pressure to drop to 0.5 atmospheres. The kilometers-scale space colonies described here would take much longer. More than enough time for some drone to patch it, or for the inhabitants to get to "life boats" or some sort of shelter.
I think the important part, then, would be to design the shell such that damage in one part can't spread too far.
The solid walls would be meters thick, so the projectile would have to be very masive and/or very fast. And even then it would take a long time for pressure to reach dangerously low levels.
A big emergency plug can be designed for large impacts, and as a last resort everybody can be trained in the use of emergency depressurization shelters. It's not without its risks, but at the same time it's not like the Earth is totally safe either. O'Neill colonies don't have to worry about natural disasters.
If there is a hull breach the baloons are automatically released, get sucked into the hole, break apart and seal it with the resin.
I can't see habitats like this existing except in the presence of an extremely peaceful and unstrained humanity-wide society.
Some more modern rotating habitat designs have a solid, stationary radiation shield with no breaks or holes. Light is instead provided by LEDs and solar panels. Many of these designs are modular, so have sub compartments.
Take any island nation: Iceland for example. They have a small population so they can’t make everything they need; they import lumber, cars, food, etc. And they always have, right from day 1 that the island was settled.
In space however the cost of constantly lifting goods from earth is too high to do that forever. So they have to be totally self sufficient. That means manufacturing, energy, extraction of minerals from asteroids, everything has to be in place. I’d say minimum 10 million population before they can assemble the diversity of industries to do that.
Once they are at that point though, what are they going to trade with earth? Any minerals they obtain will be better used in space then parachuting them down to the surface for processing. So they wouldn’t need us at all. So it’s possible but politically very difficult to justify.
It would be nice if we could deploy such, assuming we manage to avoid them being used as microwave weapons.
It entirely depends on how many of them you build. You could also achieve much higher densities than Earth with no real loss of quality of life, since you wouldn't necessarily build massive oceans or deserts or mountains. (Though I would really love to live on an O'Neill cylinder that was laid out as an archipelago!)
I don't believe for a second that Bezos thinks significant numbers of people living in floating habitats is happening any time soon if ever, but I do think he wants a bite at a contract to go to the moon, and everything about this media push down to the 2024 timeline (call me, mr president) is about pushing those buttons in one particular man's lizard brain.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I've written about this many times here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Also, this comment is much too much of a flamewar rant to be a good comment for HN. If you have a substantive point, please make it without stooping to that.
At its absolute peak the Apollo program consumed 4.4% of the US federal government budget.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/infographic.view.php?i...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_the_integrated_ci...
As the other commentator said, they are too fragile to serve as humanity’s “back-up”. As theme parks or transit vessels, sure. But not as our back-up.
Second, and in my humble opinion more importantly, these will tend to be built and owned by entities and thus everyone in them will be serfs. I honestly can’t say that a similar scenario wouldn’t play out for a planet, claimed as owned by the first flag planted. But, when the structure is wholly built and owned by a profit driven entity such as Amazon... Perhaps they can be owned by consortiums or non for profit entities, there is still issue #1.
Finally. Why build one of these (gravity levels or for transit, I guess being the valid reason I can see, but maybe there is a planet-based solution for the gravity issue, idk) instead of utilizing the planets that are already right there for the using??? And instead of using all the resources to build a habitat, build something else.
Edit: These are hotels, not homes.
Of course this highlights the problem with all of these habitat ideas: They are placed in locations with limited or no easily accessible natural resources, so their options for sustaining themselves are limited. Obviously you need some farmers and janitors and techs to keep everything running, but beyond that what are they going to do? Building stuff is kind of out of the question because you have to ship in all of the raw materials. So your industry needs to be virtual. Coding, finance, etc... But the world only needs so much of that, and if you keep building colonies you're going to saturate the virtual markets while driving insane demand in the physical markets. The economics are hard to reconcile.
To that point. If one of these habitats is built the first ones should serve as transit vessels to nearby systems, with the final destination of its crew being a planet.
Additionally, let’s take Bezo’s own logic a step further. When gravity levels are less than that of Earth, say, on the Moon, we we’ll be able to build much higher with greater economy. And we will be able to build into the Moon with greater economy as it is 60% the density of Earth. This effectively increases the livable area, if we are to count “engineered surface area”. The same is true of other planetary and Moon surfaces in our solar system.
You once again are left justifying the effort of building the habitat instead of extending the pre existing available planetary foundation
a) How do we harvest energy b) How much non-human components do we want to leave, and in what configuration, given that significant non-human components are currently required to give us a livable environment c) How do we distribute resources
Yes ultimately all of those are constrained by land area, but we have so many other things to solve first before land area is THE problem. And hilariously, it's more or less the same problems we need to solve before we need to colonize anything. How do we efficiently (measured in materials, surface area, maintenance, capital, operating cost) collect energy. How do we create and maintain true closed systems that are reasonably conducive to non-shitty human lives. How do we spread the wealth so we don't burn it all down.
Something he doesn’t touch on is fission/fusion instead of solar, so I am curious about how that changes the calculus.
Like I admire the longterm vision. I'm also a giant space nerd and think this is soooo coool. I just feel... bleh about it.
I mean, I guess if we get better space launch and space fabrication, we might able to get some sun shields in place at a reasonable time.
2015 energy usage 110PWh for the entire year[1]
That works out to ~1.8e13 W average power.
Total output for the sun is about 4e26 W[2]
This works out to about 44 doublings, and 3% growth is a doubling every 24 years which means we need to surpass Kardashev II in 1000 years.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption 2: https://hypertextbook.com/facts/1999/MatthewTsang.shtml
I think this is correct. In fact, where we live now, on a (big) planet, should be our "backup" in that you can have subterranean arcologies that protect you while your habitats are blasted by gamma ray bursts, supernovae, or what have you. (I stress big because I think we need Earth's gravity; I don't think you could lead a healthy life on Mars or much less the Moon.)
But what makes planets terrible for being your "main space" is that the climates and biology are harder to control (climate change, zoonotic pandemics, volcanos, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.), resources are harder to get (they're buried deep while a wealth of exposed ore exists in the inner Asteroid Belt and a wealth of exposed ice exists in the outer Kuiper Belt), and as someone else here said the space is ironically much smaller than what you could have in a space habitat by surface area or open volume. The gravity's free -- you don't have to spin like you would on a habitat, but you pay for that by the fact that it's very hard to leave. You need to use half your fuel just to reach parking orbit, and it's untenable to build a space elevator. (A space fountain[0] might be doable, but it's still an ordeal.) It only becomes tenable when the gravity's much lower, but then we'll probably run into physiological problems.
or watch some movie with lots of space stations where things are great, and draw the opposite conclusion!
fiction isn't evidence of anything.