One Revolution per Minute [video]
erikwernquist.com
erikwernquist.com
I wonder if ancients felt this way about the sea, or sky, or mountains that seemed impassable to them, knowing or believing it was only a matter of time. Or did they wonder at areas just plain never-to-be-seen.
The emotion it conjures up is rather nice, kind of bitter sweet and expansive at the same time. It seems to stimulate the imagination to contemplate it even if you never actually go anywhere.
“Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Let's assume we have advanced but still physically plausible technology. The universe is huge. The Solar system is huge. Getting anywhere takes forever! Months, to years (can be shorted with very large energy expense, but you only go faster with the square root of energy!).
Shielding from radiation requires large barriers. So you need to spend most time in a relatively small quarters guarded by large mass barriers (magnetic fields might help a little too). Everything about living in space will probably be a mix of boring, hard/confined and extremely costly.
This kind of yearning makes me remember something that Richard Feynman said. It's something like (paraphrasing) "We know almost everything about the universe, the nature of forces, even how life works; the forces that bind everything together are known to astounding, extraordinary precision -- pretty much all phenomena relevant at all to every day life. Yet when I meet someone who isn't a physicist, they will ask almost immediately "So what don't we know about physics? What unsolved problems are there?". There's so much we do know and they're not interested in that! And it's so fascinating!". (I think that deserves a name, like "Feynman syndrome", or something :P
Like the physics we already do know (and the mathematics as well) is astounding, fascinating, I think so is where we can go, and where we can observe. Like, the Earth (and its lifeforms!) is absolutely astounding. If you go a block around your house, with a keen eye, there are probably interesting enough things to spend a lifetime studying. A single species of insect, a species of tree, microscopic polen in the air, microorganisms, human-made systems, it's just too much to tell. And you've barely left your home. Then there are all sorts of ecosystems and places on Earth, I bet most don't have to travel far to go to a place of natural beauty they've never been to. For reference, Jupiter seems to be about 600,000,000 km away from us. It's interesting and beautiful for sure, but also... a giant blob of gas. If we were a little more thankful for what we do have, that's also unlocking a great treasure.
Also, we don't value enough our imagination (and even computer games!) too I think. In a movie or computer game[2], you can make so it so the travel to Jupiter takes seconds (or minutes to hours, just to make it more exciting ;) ), and you get quite astounding views too in the comfort of your home. Telescopes and scientific missions do the same. Through fiction and fantasy, we can travel to places that don't even exist and have all sorts of exciting histories :)
If you think about it, life right here on Earth is amazingly beautiful really -- but we have to look with the right eye (mindset and wisdom) to see it at all...
That said, bring in the space movies :)
[1] Nothing at all wrong with a little romanticism I think, that's good. But we shouldn't lose sights of reality...
[2] I really wish computer games were more culturally valued, and not seen as a way to kill time, or an addictive past time. They're really our tool to travel to brand new worlds at our fingertips (of course, with great power comes great responsibility...), we should recognize that as our generation's great medium !
Similar depictions occur in fiction, most of which are fairly shallowly-disguised Western, Journey, or Empire sagas relocated in space, though without any actual foundations on physics. Hard science fiction can sometimes make a few nods to reality, and often exists as a sort of "what if", exploring the potential consequences of some scientific or technological capability being realised, but again has very little basis in any known physics.
And I write this as someone who was caught hook, line, and sinker by the von Braun vision of spaceships to the planets, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and others. As I've gotten older it's the psychological and social explorations which are more interesting: Le Guin, Stephenson (who tends to remain in near-Earth orbits), Bradbury, Butler, KSR, and the like.
Not that the fantasy isn't still attractive at times, and with the capabilities for visualising potential space-scapes and starscapes, the visual imagery really is stunning, as in 1RPM here.
(I'd watched before reading the description, and pretty much all the points Wernquist highlighted were ones I'd noted in the video itself.)
Transporters specifically were "invented" due to budget constraints on the original series. The original plan was for the crew to use a shuttlecraft whenever they visited a planet, but that proved too costly-- In the absence of CGI, that would have to be done with practical effects, i.e. a model shuttle filmed landing on model terrain. The transporter shots, on the other hand, were really just a fancy cross-fade.
Though you might also consider that landing from the ISS, in low-Earth orbit, takes at least hours presently. This Dragon X capsule landing initiated at 11:05 GMT on 3 September 2023, and was scheduled to splash down at 04:17 GMT on the 4th, over 17 hours later.
<https://www.space.com/spacex-crew-6-astronauts-depart-iss-we...>
Descent phase for the Soyuz is at least three hours.
Launch-to-dock takes 6 hours to 3 days: <https://starlust.org/how-long-does-it-take-to-get-to-the-iss...>
With transporters, script writers can bounce characters between locations in seconds.
Regarding the FX challenges: It's common to re-use stock or standard footage for such segments, which already occurs with many spaceflight sequences in Star Trek and related series. With the ability to swap in different backgrounds (using mattes or rear projection in the pre-CGI era) this gains more flexibility. Establishing shots are the equivalent for contemporary or historical terrestrially-based plots, programmes, series, etc.
Viewing television productions with an eye to scene, set, and location cost helps one realise why so many scenes are shot in low-rent locations: car parks, warehouses, docks, drainage canals, desert, etc. (Also typically proximate to major film studio locations as with Hollywood or elsewhere.)
After all, who’d design a fuel tank that explodes when it loses power and “antimatter containment” fails.
That's part of the sadness. But it is possible to spread throughout the solar system, and so it's a matter of scale after that.
At one time, nobody could leave the shoreline or they'd be lost forever. We have invented our way out of most of it.
Now, I enjoy thinking about how _different_ it would be from any journey we've taken. Something more like frozen embryos and robotic caregivers than a ship full of brave men. I mean, what would they eat? But it is not at all impossible, just unfathomable to us.
Not really. In this solar system, the off-Earth real estate is pretty bad. Worse than almost anywhere on Earth. Most of Canada and Alaska are vacant, after all, and those areas have air and water. Now that it looks like human population is peaking, there's not much pressure to inhabit low-value real estate.
Space travel belongs to machines. Small ones. Read Ashlee Vance's new book, "When the Heavens Went on Sale". All the action now is in small satellites and small to medium sized rockets. If and when Space-X gets its Starship working, it may turn out to be a white elephant, like the Space Shuttle. There just aren't that many big payloads worth launching. About once a year, somebody buys a Falcon Heavy launch, and once or twice a year. China launches a Long March 5.
So I think the demand is there & finally the costs are low enough to enable many missions that we just can't afford before (like all those lunar landers showing up recently) and I don't think this trend will slow down any time soon, thankfully.
Think of a Falcon 9 second stage but instead of payload, it had more tank, more fuel, a docking ring and a set of RCS thrusters. It gets to orbit, finds its ”passenger”, docks to it and pushes it into whatever trajectory it wants to go.
Add a truss with multiple docking rings to your payload and you can add multiple tugs to give a larger payload a bigger kick.
Even packing a few kick stages on top of F9s or F9 heavies would enable some interesting missions - as both trajectory can be higher energy and payload doesn’t need to be trimmed to the minimum viable mass.
This is something that drives me nuts about wannabe photographers. They all immediately travel off to "exotic" locations to take pictures of "exotic" people and things.
Your house and neighborhood is plenty exotic enough for a lifetime's work, if you have the eye.
Your first three paragraphs are the answer to the so-called Fermi Paradox.
If your species has adapted to spending tens of thousands of years in tiny craft isolated by vast distances from anything else, leaving that environment would be extremely risky and difficult.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
<https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43650/auguries-of-inn...>
IMO the only solutions to the paradox are either that intelligent life is really, really rare or civilizations wipe themselves out in some kind of filtering event.
So the people might live in a disconnected digital paradise, but their automated servants might cross the void at relativistic speeds to harvest any and all matter and energy not bolted down, to upgrade the paradise of their masters.
Or even find out that some weird natural phenomenons might be actually results of such engineering endeavors.
As for shielding - there are ways around that. To shield from your own reactor you can use shadow shields & fit you ship quite comfortably into the protected cone it provides. If you are afraid of solar radiation, you can use that as well, just orient your ship accordingly when a solar flare is detected that could har you.
For fixed stations you either are on some body & have more or less unlimited amounts of "dirt" for shielding or for an orbital installation you should be able to accumulate enough material over time & it should not really matter as such stations would likely rarely change their orbit, if ever.
And lastly, you might be able to improve humans over time to better handle the space environment via new medical practices, new drugs or even various physical enhancements.
Modern people live in many places where their predecessors would not survive (or at least not with any reasonable quality of life) and this seems like another such challenge & stepping stone for humans.
The amount of shielding needed is squared every time you increase the amount of living space by the third power. All that means is that whenever people manage to live on space, they will live on something huge, not a station like the one on the movie. The most stupid way to do it is by creating small quarters on small stations.
Also, that's when near a star. If you are moving very fast away from one, your need for shielding will increase linearly every time you increase the living space by the third power. Making smaller ships even less viable, but large ones with plenty of space.
Spend 8 hours slowly digging an access tunnel on Mars, 8 hours in the fully immersive fantasy world of Unicornia as a level 85 troll-mage, 8 hours sleeping. Rinse, repeat.
Without the mental escape, there would be sadism and brutality.
Extra points for advocating for playing/exploring video games!
Showreel: https://erikwernquist.com/showreel
Without giving too much away, it assumes that humans need gravity to heal properly, otherwise things like bruises won't heal since you can't drain the fluids without gravity.
e.g. How much of the health benefits of 1G do you get at 0.9 G? at 0.5G or 0.1G? Where's the inflection point?
Would you still get the benefit if you rest in full gravity for 8 hours, and then move out of the ring section of a space station for the rest of the day? Would 1 hour per day in gravity do it?
How would people's health be impacted by a long-term stay on the Moon (at 0.17G ) or Mars (0.38G) ?
This is not well understood, and hard to study without more experimental data. Which would have to be gathered Off Earth.
And we might need to know sooner or later.
On the Moon you could do the Experiment on site, and bring people back on relatively short notice if it does not go well. But for Mars, if it doesn't work out there it's a long haul back, most of it at 0.0G.
There have been proposals to build small spin rings in orbit to do the experiments on Astronauts, but these plans have not happened yet. (2)
1) https://davidson.weizmann.ac.il/en/online/sciencepanorama/da...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11536970/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_spaceflight_on_the_h...
> Would you still get the benefit if you rest in full gravity for 8 hours, and then move out of the ring section of a space station for the rest of the day? Would 1 hour per day in gravity do it?
Again, curious if this is the case, would spending less time >1G but <2G be equivalent to spending larger amounts of time at 1G?
Maybe that will be the answer. Or maybe the repeatedly changing gravity will really mess people up.
The experiments need to be done, but my wild uninformed guess is:
Human health is not math, the numbers won't stack up like "1.5G times 2 hours = 3 G-hours"
Humans have evolved under 1.0G, all the way back the the ancestor who crawled up out of the sea around 400 million years ago. That's a long time with that as an environmental constant. Deviation from that environment in either direction, up or down, will have negative effects on the body. Some easy to predict, some less so.
One of the very good reasons not to do it is vibration and oscillation that would ruin some microgravity experiments.
Before going to Mars, the experiments will have to be done.
Another way to try it out is: if people are healthy on the Moon's gravity for a long term, then Mars gravity is likely healthy too.
So this says that in reality, going to Mars is not close, as neither of these experiments are immanent.
Seems like it's true!
It's a great series, it's not as "hard" sci-fi, but the imagery is absolutely incredible.
It's a hunch, but Ithink, as humans, we don't do well with frequencies from 0.01 to 100Hz [1]. Most (all?) of human cognition happens there, and to me it feels like a recipe for a a cognitive resonance.
[1] I find it cool that the range is centered about 1 s - a fraction of time we call "a moment" that, to me, best anchors the concept of "present".
Why 0.5G and not 1G though? Aside from the narration that decision doesn't seem to have any impact on the video. I would expect that difference to have a noticeable effect on things like the posture of the plants, the design of the pool, the flight of the butterflies, the posture and gait of the man. Ever accidentally bump a drinking glass, but not enough to knock it over? A wine glass sitting statically on a table will look pretty much the same at 0.5G, but half the downward force means you're probably much more likely to accidentally knock it over. So would we really use the same sort of glasses on a space station like this?
Aside from one line about "walk, don't run, don't jump", all of this would be arguably more realistic/accurate if they just called it 1.0G, so I find that decision to be curious.
From TFA, which consists (apart from the video) of 8 short paragraphs in its entirety.
> I believe that the perpetually spinning views would be extremely nauseating for most humans, even for short visits. Even worse, I suspect - when it comes to the comfort of the experience - would be the constantly moving light and shadows from the sun.
In general, the major point of artistic license in the project is the windows, which the author acknowledges. A realistic (and still extremely exciting and inspiring) rotating space habitat this size would rotate at 1.4rpm to achieve 1g, and would not have transparent glass windows for safety and nausea reasons (replace them with screens that show a non-rotating view of the outside for a similar effect without the safety and nausea cost).
It's also worth noting that the habitat could be made bigger, to have 1rpm cause 1g. It would require a habitat with a radius of 890m, so a total circumference of 5.6km, still well within the tensile strength of steel for suspension under 1g (I personally wouldn't trust a rotating space habitat to be made out of composites or similar materials until we have a much, much better understanding of composite failure modes and a reliable way of testing/repairing such structures - steel is best because we know how to use it, what its limits are, and because it has fatigue resistance without being absurdly expensive like titanium). A habitat like that would not have the rooms visibly curve as much as they do in this video, though.
What’s the point of travelling without windows?
You can have some observation sections, but regular windows everywhere don't make sense in this case.
The stars, the planets... At least on spaceships.
As for submarines, I have to agree. Windows are mostly pointless.
- to go where no one has gone before and see what no one else has seen
- to watch the development of a storm cell on Jupiter in real time
- because screens relaying a real time feed aren't really "less real" than windows which inherently have to filter out various wavelengths for basic safety
- because travelling with a ship covered in windows in space is suicidal, which in my opinion tends to dull the point of anything
- because studying the effects of various levels of artificial gravity on humans has inherent scientific value
- because cupolas like those on the ISS are easy enough to make safe without needing to fatally compromise the safety of your habitat with windows everywhere
- because real time control and maintenance of scientific equipment significantly improves the scientific productivity you can achieve with that equipment, and enables new experiments
- because humanity and intelligent life is not meant to occupy 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003% of the universe forever, and our cradle being special and worth preserving doesn't mean we should never leave the cradle
- because extant human society already wastes the talents of billions of current and future people confined by poverty into being unable to fulfill their potential, and confining humanity to an infinitesimally small portion of the universe forever is bad for similar reasons
- because even intelligent ocean dwellers could not have predicted fire when considering the leap to landborne life, and likewise we can't really know what will become possible once we get to space
- because a gamma ray burst that happened 100,000 years ago could be travelling to Earth right now, ready to largely wipe out life once it arrives
- because humans are good, and more humans that have better lives is preferable to fewer with worse lives
- because there are so many resources in space that development of them could render some useful and valuable materials as cheap as water, or lead to entirely new use cases for previously scarce materials
- because children and adults alike have always looked up at the stars and dreamed of going there, and crushing dreams of hope is cynical and selfish
- because it tests and focuses our science and industry on an endeavour that leads to myriad non-space economic and cultural benefits, without the downsides of trying to kill each other in ever more horrific ways while mobilising for wars
- because the hopelessness and cynicism felt by many globally that leads to the rejection of space is an injury inflicted upon us by conditions we have to fight to overcome, not a natural state we should give in to
- because Musk & Bezos already control way too much of society, and the idea that we should abandon 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999997% of the universe to them without even struggling for it is cowardly
- because wanting to explore and share and create and leave wonder for our children is good
- because I am saddened thinking of the past 50 years of stagnation in achieving truly great human endeavours in space, and I wonder why the people who led in those times failed so badly and whether the previous generations let them get away with it or simply found themselves unable to do anything. I don't want my grandchildren to wonder that about my generation.
- because humans going to space on a large scale is realistic and achievable with appropriate safety precautions and scientific/industrial advances, which we can choose to make
- because I have hope for the future and I'm not going to give that up
I know that my eyes would perceive some spectacular things we see in the sky as dull, because they aren't as sensible as my telescope's camera, and aren't able to concentrate that much light on my retina as the telescope can.
And, yet, one can sit back in a darkened observation deck and wonder at the Milky Way rotating above.
If someone is too concerned about motion sickness, then build a bigger ring that rotates slowly.
Then the ring would either have to be larger or faster. Both are harder to build.
A sufficiently large pod would have an arc-of-circle structure, and multiple independent pods might be arranged in a spoke-like pattern.
Given tensile strengths of various cables, this should be generally attainable. Dynamic effects within a tensile-cable structure could however be problematic: shimmies, twists, or other movements, particularly if they are somehow amplified with time.
Certainly harder for NASA to build in space, but not any harder for this author to build in a computer :-D
Good point though:
> Regarding the dimensions, I wanted to make the structure as large as possible, while still getting a clear visual sense of the curvature in the interiors. That is how I ended up with the 450-meter radius and 1 RPM spin rate.
So it seems like he wanted to put specific constraints on the size/geometry and worked backwards from there.
At first I found myself questioning the speed of the rotation, it seemed faster than claimed - 1rpm is not a lot?
Then I did the math: A quarter turn is a right angle, floor becomes wall. A quarter minute is every 15 seconds. That's about what's happening in the video. And it's quite disconcerting to watch continuously. I would not want to see faster rotation.
So the video is chosen for speed of motion and size of ring, and how they look. 1 G would either be faster motion or less curve, and it seems that the author didn't want those, for valid aesthetic reasons.
All that added inertia could also make maneuvers & burns harder.
Maybe Moon is quite enough. Maybe Mars is not enough. We don't really know, and we'd better find out.
Yes, but it would also be significantly easier to catch before it hits the floor, right?
1. Would the Coriolis force tend to set up a big overturning cell in that swimming pool? i.e. there would be circulation along the top, down one end, back along the bottom, and up the other side?
2. Is this some kind of suicide cruise? They just seem to head out into interstellar space at the end. The delta-V to return to Earth would be incredible. And no more gravity assists once you're past the major planets.
That second ship that docs might very well be something like antimatter propulsion tug or even something wilder like nuclear salt water rocket. Probably nothing nuclear/electric as no serious radiators for all the waste heat such a system would generate can be seen.
Check out these panels from one of my favorite web-comics (they do their research):
The style apparently has a name, Post-classical editing:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-classical_editing>
I'm ... not particularly a fan myself and often slow videos considerably to savour the detail.
> Beautifully rendered video of a wheel-shaped space habitat with artificial gravity. This shows viscerally what I pointed out in my Substack posts on the Single-Family Space Colony: that windows are a bad idea in rotating environments
https://mastodon.social/@KarlSchroeder/111161480469784844
A bad idea because: Since this is just a visualisation, the safety aspect is secondary to the way that it's quite disorientating, vertiginous, maybe even inducing of motion sickness.
I expect that a more practical design would have observation decks, but not huge windows everywhere. But that wouldn't make as nice a visualisation.
That effect always evokes Vangelis on Blade Runner <- analog synths <- Buchla, who could have implemented steady pitch but apparently designed the oscillators to slowly lose pitch, because so do violins but so what? :)
Which makes one wonder...
Bizarro Buchla designs a precise oscillator -> precision and fidelity war in analog synths -> precise, staccato Bizarro Vangelis Blade Runner -> warbly Bizarro DX7 -> wide-vibrato 80s dance music -> warbly glitch hop -> VEDM (vibrato electric dance music) -> nostalgia for precise, staccato analog sounds in Stranger Things?
1: double pun: Spinal Tap and Stranger Things!
It would be interesting to get a longer video from the dinner table for instance.
The window frames really help, so I'm not sure the final scene with the gentleman looking out the window would be something I would do.
Wonder how difficult it was to convince whatever physics engine to simulate water with curved gravity.
We always see the best when there is no compromise. When you have the time to dedicate to something you want seen, and the passion and the energy to see through it from concept to premiere, you can achieve the sublime.
... unless you're Sally[0]
Lay as a present-tense intransitive verb is slang[1], just like "ain't" (another bit of slang in that song) and so it stands out in a video and presentation that otherwise conveys a sense of formality and seriousness.
[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/how-to-use-lay-and-l...
That's the parameters of a "Banks Orbital" https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Orbital_(Wikipedia_versio...
Which is:
> For such an orbital to reproduce the equivalent to the Earth's gravity, whilst maintaining Earth's 24-hour period of rotation, it would need to have a diameter of approximately 3.71 million kilometres, and spinning at 486,000 km/hr.
I know that's true of Niven's ringworld, which is just unholy scale and parameters - 1 rotation like the earth does in a year, every 9 days! (1)
And so it cannot be made from atoms, something with "tensile strength similar to the strong nuclear force" is needed (2)
But is it true of Banks's more practical Orbital as well? This reference says yes: "No form of ordinary matter will support the tensions of a Banks Orbital's spin, so exotic matter is required." (3)
1) http://www.alcyone.com/max/reference/scifi/ringworld.html
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/47e1bb1fc898c
"Using accelerated streams of projectiles or particles to either transfer momentum or support a large structure."
This is basically active super strong matter that requires uninterrupted continuous control, power supply and real time adjustments - or bad things happen very very quickly. What is there not to love?! ;-)
* Possible, not necessarily practical.
You have: (1 gravity) / (1/1440 * rpm)^2
You want: million km
* 1.854336
/ 0.5392766
You have: (0.5 gravity) / (1 rpm)^2
You want: m
* 447.12962
For 1 g at 1 RPM:
You have: (1 gravity) / (1 rpm)^2
You want: m
* 894.25925
You have: (1 gravity) / (3 rpm)^2
You want: m
* 99.362139
Also via GNU Units:
You have: sqrt(1 gravity / earthradius)
You want: revolution/day
* 17.060434
You have: 1 day / 17
You want: hour; minute; second
1 hour + 24 minute + 42.352941 second
That's about once every 84 minutes.
Which, I recognise is also roughly the orbital period for low-Earth orbit, that is, an object falling around the Earth without ever striking the surface. Though I think that may be a coincidence. Compare geosyncronous orbit (~42,000 km from Earth's centre), with the radius at which there is 1g of centrifugal acceleration at 1 revolution per 24 hours, ~2 million km.
Fun to play with however.
If you had a trans-ring commute, at 100 kph, that would take you about 6 years 7 months one way.
A jet aircraft operating at nearer 1,000 kph would cut that to a far more manageable 7 months. Though I'd still use it as a reasonable argument for return-to-office.
Ping times would still be about 38 seconds even for free-vacuum direct transmission, around the ring itself. Given lightspeed is reduced to about 66% of its in vacuo* value in fibre optics, you'd have almost exactly a 1 minute delay. Something to keep in mind during those Ring Zoom sessions.
It would be oriented so that the sun appears to rise just to the side of the ring - When it's overhead the arc of the ring would appear to be near the sun, but not eclipsing it. This is nearer to vertical than the sun over much of Earth much of the time.
You're quite a bit off.
It's actually a little under 4 million km; several times the diameter of the sun.
I don't like how videogames have artificial gravity in space. It's a videogame, you can reduce the gravity to zero, instead we get the same gravity as anywhere else. I feel like Fry the first time he goes to the moon in Futurama.
And this piece is sci-fi, but it's mostly sci-fi engineering, not sci-fi physics.
To suggest that ""We don't have it until the future" is wrong. Centrifuges are a thing. Building one in space would be only an engineering challenge. The "how it works" part is well-understood science. There are detailed plans for smaller rings in space, building one is just a matter of NASA budgets and priorities (they chose more robots to outer planets instead, over twirling canned humans in LEO, and there are upsides to that).
It's classical physics, even: The old rivals of that, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz literally did the math in the 1600s on how centrifugal force works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_centrifugal_and_cen...