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Comment by themagician | Hacker News Reader

I doubt humans will ever live beyond earth. I can’t see how it’s possible. Lack of gravity, lack of pressure, excessive radiation. We’d literally need antigravity and magical force fields to sustain what we consider “human”.

A few generations off Earth and humans won’t even be humans anymore. We will become aliens ourselves IF we manage to survive.

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Antigravity is provided by rotating a cylinder along it's longitudinal axis. It's very simple stuff.

Not sure why we need force fields. If you meant radiation shielding, liquid hydrogren or even water is a fine radiation shield. Life evolved on earth in shallow seas before there was an ozone layer.

All of the things you mentioned are possible, but very expensive today. The reason we wouldn't live beyond earth is because people just accept that it's too hard and too magical.

Forget costs. Where are you even going to get the materials for that at scale?

Sounds good for a space ship or small space station. How do you make that work for thousands of people?

Asteroids

Moon is close by, has plenty of sunlight, aluminum and apparently iron ores, some water. It all is at a reasonable gravity that allows to safety operate on the surface, but cheaply launch a lot into earth orbit, even using electromagnetic catapults that don't require a propellant.

> Antigravity is provided by rotating a cylinder

That's not antigravity, it's just Coriolis Force.

Do you mean centrifugal?

I think you are right. I actually meant "центробежная сила", but blame Google Translate [1] which translated is as Coriolis Force (english is not my first language).

I thought it is a bit weird, but then I though thata US still uses imperial units, which 100x weirder, so I didn't check further. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[1] https://bit.ly/37b6cwc

Humans are living beyond earth, right now, as you read this, on the ISS.

The ISS is about the same distance from Earth that New York City is from Washington DC. It's technically still in the Earths' atmosphere.

Right but it is beyond Earth as in it's orbiting the planet and has microgravity.

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