Thoughts on Musk and Bezos from Peter Diamandis.
More thoughts, on science fiction versus science fact, from The Economist‘s Oliver Morton.
2 thoughts on “The Great Migration Into Space”
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Thoughts on Musk and Bezos from Peter Diamandis.
More thoughts, on science fiction versus science fact, from The Economist‘s Oliver Morton.
Comments are closed.
–Bezos revitalized and resurfaced O’Neill’s work by proclaiming that the vision for Blue Origin after reaching the Moon was to support the development of O’Neill Colonies, where humanity could live free of the deep gravity forces of planets. Each rotating colony would be able to support an independent population of 1 million individuals.–
AND
–With $180 million in his pocket, Musk set out to pursue what he considered the two most important missions for humanity: (1) Taking humans off fossil fuels via a thriving solar economy; and (2) Making humanity a multiplanetary species.–
What is “an independent population of 1 million individuals”
I have noticed over the years Mars fans also using “self sufficient” which seem similar to “independent”
Mars or L-5 type things are not going to survive being isolated.
And with these levels of human population anywhere in space, leaving Earth will be quite cheap.
And getting stuff from space to Earth is currently cheap and would get foolish cheap with a million souls in space.
I would say that Mars or L-5 would be a lot more “spacefaring” than most of Earth- going anywhere and staying there sort of misses the whole point of going anywhere in space [or escaping from the Earth’s gravity well]. So sort of like escaping Earth gravity and expecting a weaker gravity well to keeping a million people “someplace”- it’s quite the opposite.
Anyhow, I think if you have martians, you will have Earth with SPS.
And before one can build a L-5 colony of 1 million people, Earth will have SPS.
A problem [perhaps slight] with L-5 is it will have speed limit within it’s vicinity- probably anywhere within 500 km radius [or further]. And a spacefaring civilization will probably be “use to” going quite fast, and dislike having to go so slow near the L-5.
A thing I wondered about recently is the pictures of L-5 which look like huge greenhouses, it seems the air pressure would be problem, structurally, with that glass.
Maybe greenhouse structure is just for plants and at low pressure?
The giant window are indeed having to hold against one atmosphere of pressure. More recent designs sometimes try to stay with the skylights, and some use alternatives. Most at least use sets of mirrors and shielding to avoid direct radiation paths through the windows, because to use the windows as sufficient radiation protection would make them too thick to transmit much light.
The total mass of glass required scales linearly with the desired window sizes. Keeping the glass thickness at 4 to 5% of the maximum diameter should provide a safety factor of about 5, depending on the glass and mounting details. Lots of little windows are light, fewer really big windows are heavy.
I could talk for days about the windows. I’d rather just abandon them and make really thin, lightweight glass mirrors to concentrate the sunlight onto targets, either channeling it inside (using a few small windows or light tubes) and then dispersing it, or concentrating it on a heat engine that runs high intensity lights.
I was inclined to favor solar cells driving LED or HID lighting, which is one of the simplest solutions, but really big colonies probably can’t depend on solar cells. A Carrington solar flare event that fries any unshielded electrical devices hanging out in free space would be a disaster if colonies are too big to evacuate before the food runs out or all the solar cells can get replaced, and in any event, even Boeing’s top solar cells in GTO only have about a 20 year life, slowly degrading over that time.