Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

[Quickshot0]

The start of this branch of the conversation was an assertion that you don't need to worry much about sustainability and reuse for your space station or interstellar colony ship. Did you forget about that?

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I recall suggesting something in the vein of not needing perfectly recycling. I also recall saying this doesn't mean no recycling, just that one need not aim for 'perfect' recycling, as one can replenish goods in a solar orbiting space station from a nearby object, like Ceres.

I'm unclear on how this relates to "Not infeasible. It's just pointless. It's like: we're not going to put engines on our submersible; we're just going to attach it to a passing sperm whale and hope it brings us somewhere useful." which seems not to relate in any particular sensible way to that and the proposal for hopping between rogue planets that I made.

Perhaps you could clarify what you thought I said that made such a suggestion reasonable, as well as why you think that was a sensible answer? Because at this moment I do not understand your thinking at all. It doesn't seem to connect to what I was talking about at all.

 

[Claudette Savagely]

I recall suggesting something in the vein of not needing perfectly recycling. I also recall saying this doesn't mean no recycling, just that one need not aim for 'perfect' recycling, as one can replenish goods in a solar orbiting space station from a nearby object, like Ceres.

I'm unclear on how this relates to "Not infeasible. It's just pointless. It's like: we're not going to put engines on our submersible; we're just going to attach it to a passing sperm whale and hope it brings us somewhere useful." which seems not to relate in any particular sensible way to that and the proposal for hopping between rogue planets that I made.

Perhaps you could clarify what you thought I said that made such a suggestion reasonable, as well as why you think that was a sensible answer? Because at this moment I do not understand your thinking at all. It doesn't seem to connect to what I was talking about at all.

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Sailing under canvas from one continent to another is hard. The sea can kill you. The weather can kill you. People sailing past you can kill you. You can get lost, or run out of provisions, or hit terrain features, or just break down. You might have to survive these hazards for years before making landfall, and then you have to do the whole thing all over again if you want to get back to where you left from.

However, the air on the sea is breathable, the water is sometimes full of food, other people who might help are sometimes close enough to do so, and lots of people before you have done this same thing for many many years. The engineering problems are constantly examined in ever greater detail. Timing, navigation, and meteorology are ever more precisely honed. There are known methods, traditions, best practice, people and knowledge to fall back on. Most of all, where you're going may be very dangerous, but it will have a breathable atmosphere and water somewhere. After all, it's another place on Earth.

It's not like that in space.

You're talking about floating a tiny mechanical bubble of life through a mostly empty three dimensional space that is definitionally constantly hostile to unaided life, while planning on making complex stops on rare and mobile three dimensional objects which are also definitionally hostile to human life, to achieve external replenishment of any and all necessary materials by extraction of raw material from an unsurveyed territory to final processing and manufacture using only the tiny mechanical bubble's contents, over a distance of light years, with appreciable losses of material through inefficiency from that tiny mechanical life bubble's systems over that whole route, where, for example, to break down without spare parts will strand you lethally, or where to lose all your air and water gradually is to die.

This is unlikely to end in successful transit between point of embarkation and destination, much less establishment of a self sustaining human liveable settlement on the other end.

Space is very big. It is so big that much of our species wide experience in taking people across great distances to somewhere far away doesn't translate at all, because what is a long way across a planet's surface is not very far at all in space. 10 light years is a long way, and the further away something is the harder it is to reach. You still haven't understood this, which suggests that you haven't thought through your suggestion very much.

This is why people are not taking you seriously.

 

[Quickshot0]

However, I am unsure that they would be easy to exploit. There's still a lot of chemical treatment to be done to refine materials and so on at large scale. It's an industry for a reason, after all. There's also the problem that you don't know in what form the thing will present themselves, sifting through an entire planet is not a fun prospect and better left to something human proximal ten thousand years from now and more alien to us than we are to chimpanzees.

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Objects with sufficient gravity to draw themselves properly spherical and up are though to have sufficient gravity and initial heating to let the material to split out based on density. This means you'd probably find most metals in the core, followed by various less dense elements and minerals further up, with an outer layer that might contain a fair amount of water... or if cold enough and retained, things like frozen nitrogen as we saw on Pluto.

Of course to get a better idea on such things we'd probably best first study various such objects in our own solar system first. That way we'd be left guessing a lot less on how to deal with such objects later on.


As for purifying the materials... well you could do it the more complicated way like Earth does, that is more energy efficient I guess... or you could try and build up some biotechnology for it, biology has shown ability to purify things as well... But if you have fusion and don't really care about the energy cost, you could plasma arc it and basically use a brute force mass separator to split things apart in their basic element. Which approach one would favor depends a bit on how much industrial infrastructure one can afford I guess... as well as how efficient energy production is... but well in this idea we're presupposing fusion. So energy shouldn't really be your biggest problem.

snip

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Maybe they meant something like that, though I'm not sure how you conclude that. So I think I'll wait for their clarification of their to me incomprehensible comment.

Though I can tell that you completely misunderstood what I proposed. There is no many light year trip, no many stops. Just a three year trip at most assuming 0.1c travel speed to a probably already partially setup settlement.

 

[Kaiya]

Objects with sufficient gravity to draw themselves properly spherical and up are though to have sufficient gravity and initial heating to let the material to split out based on density. This means you'd probably find most metals in the core, followed by various less dense elements and minerals further up, with an outer layer that might contain a fair amount of water... or if cold enough and retained, things like frozen nitrogen as we saw on Pluto.

Of course to get a better idea on such things we'd probably best first study various such objects in our own solar system first. That way we'd be left guessing a lot less on how to deal with such objects later on.


As for purifying the materials... well you could do it the more complicated way like Earth does, that is more energy efficient I guess... or you could try and build up some biotechnology for it, biology has shown ability to purify things as well... But if you have fusion and don't really care about the energy cost, you could plasma arc it and basically use a brute force mass separator to split things apart in their basic element. Which approach one would favor depends a bit on how much industrial infrastructure one can afford I guess... as well as how efficient energy production is... but well in this idea we're presupposing fusion. So energy shouldn't really be your biggest problem.


Maybe they meant something like that, though I'm not sure how you conclude that. So I think I'll wait for their clarification of their to me incomprehensible comment.

Though I can tell that you completely misunderstood what I proposed. There is no many light year trip, no many stops. Just a three year trip at most assuming 0.1c travel speed to a probably already partially setup settlement.

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What partially set up settlement? Now we're assuming someone else did it first, proved the concept workable, and there's a support network? How did they beat all these problems?

 

[Quickshot0]

What partially set up settlement? Now we're assuming someone else did it first, proved the concept workable, and there's a support network? How did they beat all these problems?

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The only group that would particularly care about fast transit would be people themselves, automated craft could afford to transit a bit slower. Modern probes have already shown the ability to persist for a decade or more with out maintenance if designed well enough after all. Especially in transit probes seem to be able to persist quite well, as seen by the deep space probes still working some decades later, the environment doesn't seem to degrade them very quickly.

So if you sent several industrial craft many many years earlier and they were automated enough to start some initial work, then obviously you'd be in a far better position. Though even if all they did was arrive with various supplies for starting operations, this would be a big step up from just depending on what you took with yourself.

Still I Thus figured one possible scenario was that there would be an already partially built facility on arrival. Certainly that would feel safer project wise, as then you aren't dependent on what ever you bring along together with the passengers... rather you could focus more on transit speed and passenger safety.


As such, there is no need to assume things like others going first or some such. Rather it's just ways to approach such projects in risk reducing ways, as well as gaining some redundancy. Making it less of an all or nothing venture and more of a plan with cut-off points in case things aren't going as you want them to.

 

[mesonoxian]

The only group that would particularly care about fast transit would be people themselves, automated craft could afford to transit a bit slower. Modern probes have already shown the ability to persist for a decade or more with out maintenance if designed well enough after all. Especially in transit probes seem to be able to persist quite well, as seen by the deep space probes still working some decades later, the environment doesn't seem to degrade them very quickly.

So if you sent several industrial craft many many years earlier and they were automated enough to start some initial work, then obviously you'd be in a far better position. Though even if all they did was arrive with various supplies for starting operations, this would be a big step up from just depending on what you took with yourself.

Still I Thus figured one possible scenario was that there would be an already partially built facility on arrival. Certainly that would feel safer project wise, as then you aren't dependent on what ever you bring along together with the passengers... rather you could focus more on transit speed and passenger safety.


As such, there is no need to assume things like others going first or some such. Rather it's just ways to approach such projects in risk reducing ways, as well as gaining some redundancy. Making it less of an all or nothing venture and more of a plan with cut-off points in case things aren't going as you want them to.

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You realize this makes the entire project vastly more expensive, right? And makes the time between huge amounts of resources being expended and any human gaining any benefit even greater? So it is an evern greater cost with even less pay off.

 

[Quickshot0]

You realize this makes the entire project vastly more expensive, right? And makes the time between huge amounts of resources being expended and any human gaining any benefit even greater? So it is an evern greater cost with even less pay off.

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I'm just considering it from a technical angle for now. If one can't show something is technically feasible, then seriously debating the economics doesn't really matter, as you can't even show it's actually possible in the first place.

Though I'm not sure I really want to drift off to economics at all, this discussion has gone quite some time already. And it seems kind of futile unless one can show that the easier case of a say a colony near the Sun, say orbiting Ceres is viable. As deep space settlement is clearly a more difficult variant of that. Which would mean that if one could make the case for a Solar Colony, that you'd afterwards still have to make the case on the economics of at least three extra aspects. That the extra costs of operating in deep space are surmountable, that operating a low c fractional craft or crafts wouldn't be to expensive of an expense for transit to the new location, that you can set up a new self sufficient industrial base with only fairly limited support from a developed one to do so.

Each of those would probably take some time to seriously consider. And the last one would obviously even require trying to extrapolate potential technologies to allow for such an industrial development in such a situation, something I suspect some here would at least be somewhat skeptical about considering previous statements.

So it kind of depends on how much everyone would even really want to get in to such a thing.


In comparison just a technical discussion would have a far more clear end point. Either it's plausible enough that regardless of economic profitability it could be made to happen, or it can not be.

 

[dhasenan]

I recall suggesting something in the vein of not needing perfectly recycling. I also recall saying this doesn't mean no recycling, just that one need not aim for 'perfect' recycling, as one can replenish goods in a solar orbiting space station from a nearby object, like Ceres.

I'm unclear on how this relates to "Not infeasible. It's just pointless. It's like: we're not going to put engines on our submersible; we're just going to attach it to a passing sperm whale and hope it brings us somewhere useful." which seems not to relate in any particular sensible way to that and the proposal for hopping between rogue planets that I made.

Perhaps you could clarify what you thought I said that made such a suggestion reasonable, as well as why you think that was a sensible answer? Because at this moment I do not understand your thinking at all. It doesn't seem to connect to what I was talking about at all.

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We pointed out that you need a high level of sustainability to support interstellar colonization, because your colony ship has to spend a long time going between star systems, and it can't resupply very well in between. You didn't think much of that idea and suggested following a comet to another star system. And comets do sometimes have very large orbits, but they're still usually not going to get you to another star system.

Your next suggestion, in response to me saying that, was to talk about rogue planets. The obvious conclusion, given the context, was that you wanted to follow a rogue planet that happened to be passing through toward your destination.

(Around then, though I missed it, you said something about a reasonable level of recycling in response to someone else's post. You were still contrasting this with sustainability.)

A rogue planet is not going toward your destination except by luck. A rogue planet is not passing near you except by luck. A rogue planet is not arriving soon enough except by luck. A rogue planet is not going fast enough to be worthwhile except by luck. A rogue planet is not going slow enough to catch up to except by luck. A rogue planet does not have useful materials except by luck. A rogue planet is not appropriately sized for efficient resource extraction with your colony's preferred technologies except by luck. A rogue planet can, by luck, escape detection.

Plus a rogue planet isn't accelerating, but it's still going slow enough that you can catch up rather quickly. So you can probably go faster if you don't follow a rogue planet.

And rogue planets are not so plentiful as to have been noticed traveling through our solar system so far, nor to have significantly perturbed the orbits of our planets, so you probably don't have a wealth of opportunities to make up for the low probability that any given rogue planet is suitable.

The amount of luck and the low speed prompted the analogy.

 

[Claudette Savagely]

Objects with sufficient gravity to draw themselves properly spherical and up are though to have sufficient gravity and initial heating to let the material to split out based on density. This means you'd probably find most metals in the core, followed by various less dense elements and minerals further up, with an outer layer that might contain a fair amount of water... or if cold enough and retained, things like frozen nitrogen as we saw on Pluto.

Of course to get a better idea on such things we'd probably best first study various such objects in our own solar system first. That way we'd be left guessing a lot less on how to deal with such objects later on.


As for purifying the materials... well you could do it the more complicated way like Earth does, that is more energy efficient I guess... or you could try and build up some biotechnology for it, biology has shown ability to purify things as well... But if you have fusion and don't really care about the energy cost, you could plasma arc it and basically use a brute force mass separator to split things apart in their basic element. Which approach one would favor depends a bit on how much industrial infrastructure one can afford I guess... as well as how efficient energy production is... but well in this idea we're presupposing fusion. So energy shouldn't really be your biggest problem.


Maybe they meant something like that, though I'm not sure how you conclude that. So I think I'll wait for their clarification of their to me incomprehensible comment.

Though I can tell that you completely misunderstood what I proposed. There is no many light year trip, no many stops. Just a three year trip at most assuming 0.1c travel speed to a probably already partially setup settlement.

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"just" a three year trip at most, assuming a 0.1c travel speed to a probably already partially set up settlement on a rogue planet, they say.

You want to run the civilian equivalent of Black Buck in space as a matter of course.

I hope you aren't in anyone's military, because your capacity to plan or indeed communicate plans is flawed. A plan that relies on support elements magically appearing, and which requires doing the hitherto impossible several times over whilst calling this a "just" or "merely" and making no account of these difficulties isn't really a plan.

It's a wish list.

 

[terma]

Objects with sufficient gravity to draw themselves properly spherical and up are though to have sufficient gravity and initial heating to let the material to split out based on density. This means you'd probably find most metals in the core, followed by various less dense elements and minerals further up, with an outer layer that might contain a fair amount of water... or if cold enough and retained, things like frozen nitrogen as we saw on Pluto.

Of course to get a better idea on such things we'd probably best first study various such objects in our own solar system first. That way we'd be left guessing a lot less on how to deal with such objects later on.

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And that's why I was wondering, there's still a lot of wondering to be done.

As for purifying the materials... well you could do it the more complicated way like Earth does, that is more energy efficient I guess... or you could try and build up some biotechnology for it, biology has shown ability to purify things as well... But if you have fusion and don't really care about the energy cost, you could plasma arc it and basically use a brute force mass separator to split things apart in their basic element. Which approach one would favor depends a bit on how much industrial infrastructure one can afford I guess... as well as how efficient energy production is... but well in this idea we're presupposing fusion. So energy shouldn't really be your biggest problem.

Click to shrink...

Running an organic factory is also going to be expensive, because you'll then need to keep your bacteria alive while they work and make sure there aren't already lots of impurities to poison them dead. Then you'll need to actually work the provided material and that can't bypass the industry requirement.

Maybe they meant something like that, though I'm not sure how you conclude that. So I think I'll wait for their clarification of their to me incomprehensible comment.

Though I can tell that you completely misunderstood what I proposed. There is no many light year trip, no many stops. Just a three year trip at most assuming 0.1c travel speed to a probably already partially setup settlement.

Click to shrink...

That's about what we meant, and you're not exactly selling this journey to Roanoke very well.

 

[Quickshot0]

snip

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Ah I see, well that explains the complete disconnect.

At no point did I actually intend to follow a comet to another star system, that's to slow. Comets in the interstellar medium tend to move at around 40 km/s and tend to take tens of thousands of years to get near other stars. Comets were as such at most seen as a potential point where one could recover some materials and perhaps do some repairs, if one just had to resupply resources. There comets contain a lot of water, they'd have sufficient hydrogen to replenish the fuel you'd be forced to expend on doing such a thing.

Still, that's at most extending your range a bit, or giving you slightly more options in case of problems, at the cost of travel time. Far from an ideal course of action.


From pretty much the start my thoughts were as such more on the far larger objects, the large Oort Clouds dwarf planets, and the soon afterwards introduced rogue planets in interstellar space. Why? Because you can just set up a permanent colony there.

It's not a way to reach another star, but the actual goal itself. A place that can be made in to a permanent point of living, a new nation. Planets should have a pretty good chance to have all the resources one needs to sustain populations of tens of millions, for millions of years. Thus making this basically a civilization in the dark.

Of course if such a civilization eventually built up enough over the centuries, they could then send out a colony to neighboring rogue planets and colonize those as well.

In doing such you'd have a very slow moving colonization wave, one that would eventually get around the entire galaxy hopping from rogue planet to rogue planet... or well if a stars just happens to be nearby one could go there as well.


Thus the advantage of this method is that you now no longer need to cross the gulf between stars, but can instead work with the much smaller gulf between planets. Dropping you from multiple light years of distance to cross, to just a few tenths of a light year. It's obvious that in the latter case your logistics for colonization would be greatly simplified.

And that's why I was wondering, there's still a lot of wondering to be done.

Running an organic factory is also going to be expensive, because you'll then need to keep your bacteria alive while they work and make sure there aren't already lots of impurities to poison them dead. Then you'll need to actually work the provided material and that can't bypass the industry requirement

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Further research is most certainly wise, yes. Just like surveying anywhere you want to go to, is probably wise as well. You can always cancel the entire idea if that particular planet is no good.

And the organic system was just a proposal to try and get something more efficient then plasma arcing everything. Such a brutal system probably can survive deep space travel for long periods of time so it the fallback option is nothing better can be thought of.

 

[terma]

So... you're selling tickets to being the caretakers of the cosmos' first gas station? Exxon-Shell employees get double votes for their managerial party candidate?

 

[Quickshot0]

So... you're selling tickets to being the caretakers of the cosmos' first gas station? Exxon-Shell employees get double votes for their managerial party candidate?

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No? Why would a home be a gas station?

I'm really not seeing where you're going with this, unless you for some reason can't conceive of living anywhere except around stars.

 

[Nyvis]

No? Why would a home be a gas station?

I'm really not seeing where you're going with this, unless you for some reason can't conceive of living anywhere except around stars.

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Why would people want to live there instead of comfortably under the sun?

 

[Quickshot0]

Why would people want to live there instead of comfortably under the sun?

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That's kind of the same kind of question as why would people ever want to live in the Arctic circle with months of permanent darkness and freezing cold, when they could live some place nice and temperate or the tropics, right?

As such I don't think I really need to answer that question, as in practice the reverse seems the norm.

I guess one consider the idea that out there is way worse then the Arctic. Still when with advanced technology they could in theory make their life there substantially more comfortable then the Arctic circle is, this doesn't really seem like a long term blocking factor.

As such, they've done worse regularly, so why not?

 

[Nyvis]

That's kind of the same kind of question as why would people ever want to live in the Arctic circle with months of permanent darkness and freezing cold, when they could live some place nice and temperate or the tropics, right?

As such I don't think I really need to answer that question, as in practice the reverse seems the norm.

I guess one consider the idea that out there is way worse then the Arctic. Still when with advanced technology they could in theory make their life there substantially more comfortable then the Arctic circle is, this doesn't really seem like a long term blocking factor.

As such, they've done worse regularly, so why not?

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There is quite a bit of difference between "it's cold" and "there is zero light or heat, and a minuscule puncture means you are dead". Also, quite a few of the population in the Arctic is there because they settled there in the past because of migratory pressure, not because they chose to give up on modern society today for the sake of it. They can definitely make their life comfortable, but at a massive cost for no gain compared to doing the same at home, or even in orbit of Earth.

No, I don't think anything is going to happen without large, unprofitable investment for a long time before we see the other end.

 

[Quickshot0]

There is quite a bit of difference between "it's cold" and "there is zero light or heat, and a minuscule puncture means you are dead". Also, quite a few of the population in the Arctic is there because they settled there in the past because of migratory pressure, not because they chose to give up on modern society today for the sake of it. They can definitely make their life comfortable, but at a massive cost for no gain compared to doing the same at home, or even in orbit of Earth.

No, I don't think anything is going to happen without large, unprofitable investment for a long time before we see the other end.

Click to shrink...

Zero light and heat? But you can in theory at least make the heat and light you want locally and well in practice we do that all the time on Earth now as well, as seen with our new relatively comfortable Antarctic bases that get used even through the Antarctic winter. So you don't need a star for those, you can make do just fine with artificial means. And the puncture idea is over done, even on the ISS a tiny puncture wouldn't mean death and that's a tiny space station with limited redundancy, so redundant airtight areas among other things deal with such matters quite well. For large colonies where you have far more space to work with, it should hold far more true yet. (Large rocks meanwhile could be detected on active detection systems, though truthfully in interstellar space the amount of objects to be encountered any millennium should be near zero. So it's not really a major threat... rather you probably have more chance of being killed by a space rock on Earth with in the protection of the atmosphere)

Also... do you have a basis to assume that such migratory pressures will never ever happen again in all of human history? That's quite the optimistic point of view in a sense. It's happened before, why would it never happen again?


Not getting in to the economics for now though, just showing something is technically realistic seems to be problematic enough with out adding such complications.


Over all I don't see a reason your position would hold for all of eternity... or you know, even necessarily the next million years. We've never been stable on anywhere even remotely close to that time scale. So there doesn't seem a reason to assume circumstances won't eventually line up for it.

 

[galahad]

"Reaching space" won't cost hundreds of billions. Building a permanent habitat in orbit will. Increased interest in space is going to be directed at practical uses of space, none of which involve colonists.

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Cities on Earth also cost hundred of billions to build.

And sometime they are also in impractical locations, and yet get built because people had a sentimental attachment to the area and wanted it built.

How much do you think Dubai costed ? It is an inefficient city in a difficult location. But the sheikhs wanted their shining metropolis in the desert, and so they made it, damn the costs and difficulties !

And like Dubai and its oil money, a space hab also has certain way of paying for itself - space solar power is the new oil.

There is quite a bit of difference between "it's cold" and "there is zero light or heat, and a minuscule puncture means you are dead". Also, quite a few of the population in the Arctic is there because they settled there in the past because of migratory pressure, not because they chose to give up on modern society today for the sake of it. They can definitely make their life comfortable, but at a massive cost for no gain compared to doing the same at home, or even in orbit of Earth.

No, I don't think anything is going to happen without large, unprofitable investment for a long time before we see the other end.

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The funny thing about responses in any threads like this is that, you see the same old tired argument that no one would want to live in space, to people who want to live in space.

 

[Nyvis]

Zero light and heat? But you can in theory at least make the heat and light you want locally and well in practice we do that all the time on Earth now as well, as seen with our new relatively comfortable Antarctic bases that get used even through the Antarctic winter. So you don't need a star for those, you can make do just fine with artificial means. And the puncture idea is over done, even on the ISS a tiny puncture wouldn't mean death and that's a tiny space station with limited redundancy, so redundant airtight areas among other things deal with such matters quite well. For large colonies where you have far more space to work with, it should hold far more true yet. (Large rocks meanwhile could be detected on active detection systems, though truthfully in interstellar space the amount of objects to be encountered any millennium should be near zero. So it's not really a major threat... rather you probably have more chance of being killed by a space rock on Earth with in the protection of the atmosphere)

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Antartica receives quite a bit of light, even during its night, and a lot of heat from the rest of the Earth. We are talking close to absolute zero here, not -80°C. I'm obviously talking about the situation outside your confined buildings you have to regulate against, not the situation inside.

Redundant airtight areas can deal with it, but you are still much more at threat than the same thing happening in the Arctic. We've learnt to deal with it on our super expensive space stations, but they're small and already a massive investment for the size. As for impacts, you were just talking about settling bodies lying there, so you bet there is something to collide with.

Also... do you have a basis to assume that such migratory pressures will never ever happen again in all of human history? That's quite the optimistic point of view in a sense. It's happened before, why would it never happen again?

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Doesn't apply in this circumstance. Migrants aren't going to be equipped to handle deep space living.

Over all I don't see a reason your position would hold for all of eternity... or you know, even necessarily the next million years. We've never been stable on anywhere even remotely close to that time scale. So there doesn't seem a reason to assume circumstances won't eventually line up for it.

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We will have exhausted the resources in the solar system way before that though. Our timeline isn't eternity, it's as long as we have accessible resources to try with.

 

[galahad]

Antartica receives quite a bit of light, even during its night, and a lot of heat from the rest of the Earth. We are talking close to absolute zero here, not -80°C. I'm obviously talking about the situation outside your confined buildings you have to regulate against, not the situation inside.

Redundant airtight areas can deal with it, but you are still much more at threat than the same thing happening in the Arctic. We've learnt to deal with it on our super expensive space stations, but they're small and already a massive investment for the size. As for impacts, you were just talking about settling bodies lying there, so you bet there is something to collide with.



Doesn't apply in this circumstance. Migrants aren't going to be equipped to handle deep space living.



We will have exhausted the resources in the solar system way before that though. Our timeline isn't eternity, it's as long as we have accessible resources to try with.

Click to shrink...

Hollow out asteroids. Spin it up for gravity. The thick mile deep shell provide impact protection and plenty of radiation insulation. Split it up in thousands of compartments, there i solved your air leaking issue. Spam PV panels around the asteroid, there you go, all the power for grow lights for plants.

Expensive ? Current space stations are expensive because they launch on expendable launch vehicles that are produced in an inefficient manner. With reusables and other innovative methods like launch loops you can get launch costs down low, like below $100 / kg, and may be even below $ 20 / kg.

 

[Nyvis]

Hollow out asteroids. Spin it up for gravity. The thick mile deep shell provide impact protection and plenty of radiation insulation. Split it up in thousands of compartments, there i solved your air leaking issue. Spam PV panels around the asteroid, there you go, all the power for grow lights for plants.

Click to shrink...

And bam, asteroid pieces, because it's not built to handle the forces the rotation needed for gravity causes. I remember a good discussion on a scifi story about this being unlikely to be the right solution, and processing the asteroids to build a manmade rotating structure being much more likely to be strong enough to withstand the forces needed. I haven't done the math, but I would go with the crafted one if I had to choose.

Also, we were discussing bases in deep space. Solar panels aren't going to give you enough power to run all your systems.


To be clear, my general position is that we can reach other systems before we exhaust all the resources in the solar system if we get past the hurdle of exhausting those on Earth before we get off, but it will take a chunk of that allocated time to develop the technologies and resources needed, and it can't come from profit focused approaches because the investment is going to be massive.

 

[terma]

Hollow out asteroids. Spin it up for gravity. The thick mile deep shell provide impact protection and plenty of radiation insulation. Split it up in thousands of compartments, there i solved your air leaking issue. Spam PV panels around the asteroid, there you go, all the power for grow lights for plants.

Expensive ? Current space stations are expensive because they launch on expendable launch vehicles that are produced in an inefficient manner. You can get launch costs down low, like below $100 / kg, and may be even below $ 20 / kg.

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Most asteroids have the consistency of runny dogshit, motes of dust sharing an orbit, the ones that don't aren't going to take that much punishment because they aren't actual built structures and are already full of faults and stresses.

The great part of this is that I won't have to argue against it myself because someone already did for me. Thanks, Scott Manley. The answer is, hahaha, no.

 

[galahad]

And bam, asteroid pieces, because it's not built to handle the forces the rotation needed for gravity causes. I remember a good discussion on a scifi story about this being unlikely to be the right solution, and processing the asteroids to build a manmade rotating structure being much more likely to be strong enough to withstand the forces needed. I haven't done the math, but I would go with the crafted one if I had to choose.

Also, we were discussing bases in deep space. Solar panels aren't going to give you enough power to run all your systems.

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In that case don't spin the asteroid itself. Instead put O'Neill cylinder stations inside the asteroid for spin gravity, with the asteroid acting as a protective outer shell.

 

[Nyvis]

In that case don't spin the asteroid itself. Instead put O'Neill cylinder stations inside the asteroid for spin gravity, with the asteroid acting as a protective outer shell.

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Why not just build your cylinder and make it thick enough to protect then? The asteroid is more of a hindrance than anything.

 

[Catty Nebulart]

So... you're selling tickets to being the caretakers of the cosmos' first gas station? Exxon-Shell employees get double votes for their managerial party candidate?

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Just imagine a soceity free from heretics or infidels governed in accordance with God's will.... Which he for some strange reason he can't enforce on the larger human soceity... The Puritans fled England because they where persecuted... But they came to Holland from which they fled to America because they couldn't persecute others. (Yes I know I'm way oversimplifying history)

I have no doubt there will be similar religious Exoduses (exidi?) In the future when space travel and life support systems are cheap and plentiful enough. And a small colony could spend centuries fully mining out even a small planetoid converting it into more mining and industrial equipment and more habitat. Converting even a small rogue planet is likely the work of millennia.... And would provide comfortably for trillions of people even if they sell much of their produced goods.

There is quite a bit of difference between "it's cold" and "there is zero light or heat, and a minuscule puncture means you are dead"

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What little puncture? Even something as small and flimsy as the iss... If there is a 1cm hole punched into the station the astronauts still have hours to react and make repairs. I get that space is unintuitive, but think of it as say a hole drilled in a swimming pool. Unless you are using a tunnel boring machine it will take a while for the pool to drain. If you just use a normal drill bit... It would take days to drain. And just like a pool drain you can stopper it by placing your finger on the hole, you won't be sucked through it. Now don't take that analogy too far but in many ways water is worse than air, water is better at erosion and incompressible, this means that an air leak would tapper of quicker and cause less damage.