Critical Mass
author Daniel Suarez's latest space-tech thriller, a group of pioneering astropreneurs must overcome never-before-attempted engineering challenges to rescue colleagues stranded at a distant asteroid—kicking off a new space race in which Earth's climate crisis could well hang in the balance. When unforeseen circumstances during an innovative—and unsanctioned—commercial asteroid-mining mission leave two crew members stranded, those who make it back must engineer a rescue, all while navigating a shifting web of global political alliances and renewed Cold War tensions. With Earth governments consumed by the ravages of climate change and unable to take the risks necessary to make rapid progress in space, the crew must build their own nextgen spacecraft capable of mounting a rescue in time for the asteroid's next swing by Earth. In the process they'll need to establish the first spin-gravity station in deep space, the first orbiting solar power satellite and refinery, and historic infrastructure on the moon's surface—all of which could alleviate a deepening ecological, political, and economic crisis back on Earth, and prove that space-based industry is not only profitable, but possibly humanity's best hope for a livable, peaceful future.
Stats for nerds
7recommend
19mentions
13people
2023–2026years
53% recommend42% neutral5% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- It's not hard, it just takes a lot of energy.
Enough cheap energy (that doesn't produce CO2) and some incentive and you could have CO2 slowly removed.
Like in Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez.
- In that case, yes. But for solar farms, it's the opposite.
That's why I think we should end up with:
- gas plants: easy and cheap to spin up, can provide district heating
- nuclear: squeaky clean, issues are concentrated in one spot, district heating
- solar panels: super cheap, decentralized, and there are lots of opportunities like rooftops and carparks where we are wasting sunlight right now
I just re-read Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez (great book if you like hard near-future sci-fi) and that has the idea of solar stations in geostationary orbit and beaming power to where it's needed with a phased-array microwave transmitter on the station, and rectennas where you need them on the ground. We can't do this economically any time soon, but that would be clean, and require no power lines
- Check out dV by Daniel Suarez (actually the sequel, Critical Mass, is about a Lunar Base).
SPOILERS AHEAD
To say it briefly, a base on the moon could solve the climate and energy crisises.### ### ###Longer version. Think of Earth's gravity well. It's the obstacle to any significant space infrastructure. Anything of matter can't be built on LEO, with resources shot from , because it would destroy Earth's atmosphere.
Unlike resources in Lunar regolith (sand on moon). Moons gravity is much lower and there is no atmosphere. Harder to land than on Earth, It's just that we would need a significant amount of mass to jumpstart Moon excavation.
- I recently read "Delta-v" and the sequel "Critical Mass: A Novel" by Daniel Suarez. They're very much fiction but there is a certain amount of science underpinning the arguments and I enjoyed that aspect. And the author even states that he's trying to get across, with solid arguments, why humanity should begin planning asteroid mining ASAP. In brief, the arguments are:
Firstly we're now at a point where we have lots of cheap energy available, principally chemical. Depending on many factors it's conceivable that we are in fact at or near peak human energy output (e.g. WW3 or civilization collapse - the next iteration of civilization won't have so much cheap oil to exploit).
Secondly LEO is not yet full of junk, meaning that it's trivial to find launch windows to LEO and beyond. That could easily change very much for the worse in a relatively short time (I infer decades from the books).
Finally it's unrealistic to expect us to colonize the Moon or Mars using only Earth-mined materials. You can launch a spacecraft to Mars easily, but to launch a small city's amount of construction equipment and raw materials is beyond our capabilities.
Conclusion: now is the best time to mine asteroids. We can do all of the processing and much of the construction in LEO (or even better at Earth-Moon or Earth-Sun lagrange points) and then, with relatively low delta-v, we'd actually have a chance of becoming an interplanetary species!
But, the novels warn, the window of opportunity will eventually ("soon") close. Well worth the read.
Maybe someone else more familiar with the arguments, who has also read these novels, can offer a critique?
- If you liked The Martian and Project Hail Mary, two books I cannot recommend enough are Daniel Suarez' Delta-V and Critical Mass. Highly technical focused hard-sci-fi about asteroid mining and human dynamics in high-risk envrionments. I can't vouch for the absolute factual correctness, but it has an appendix listing the papers the author indirectly references for the book.
- I'm reading that book right now for the second time. It's even better than The Martian. It's kind of in the same spirit as Delta-V or Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez. Sci-fi with some of the details worked out.
