Stats for nerds
2recommend
11mentions
4people
2009–2021years
27% recommend73% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Bringing a thing from space down to earth should, if we're smart about it, be a free source of energy. If it's very expensive instead, that's from some combination of insufficient capital base and poverty of ideas. For instance, a skyhook -- a spinning tether in orbit -- could lower one payload into the atmosphere and boost another into space, at no net energy cost.
A pretty good, if very old, popular intro to this kind of thinking was Heppenheimer's Colonies in Space (free on the web now).
Mars seems unpromising because it's at the bottom of a gravity well, has an inconvenient atmosphere, should be preserved for scientific research while there's still a chance of traces of life, etc. Asteroids seem way more useful, and the Moon is nearer.
- Speed is not so much an issue if you're trying to stay long term. If you can find it, look up T. A. Heppenheimer's Colonies in Space. The "Up on the Farm" chapter was fun to read, and it has a pretty extensive set of references.
Farmed Tilapia might also be an option, though I'm not clear on how flexible their diet is.
- Also, TA Heppenheimer's Colonies in Space has a dandy compilation chapter on research on agriculture in enclosed environments. ("Up on the farm")
http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/colonies_chap0...
Most of what's talked about in that chapter will also be possible on Mars.
- Those images pretty much all trace to the work of Gerard K. O'Neill, a physist who began looking at the question of space colonisation in the late 1960s / early 1970s, notably at Princeton University, where he'd asked the question of where best to attempt space colonisation, notably contrasting planetary (or lunar) surfaces with orbiting space platforms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O'Neill
The background is discussed in T.A. Heppenheimer's 1977 book Colonies in Space, chapter 2:
https://space.nss.org/colonies-in-space-chapter-2-our-life-i...
O'Neill himself published The High Frontier in 1976.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colon...
https://archive.org/details/highfrontierhuma0000onei (for borrowing, not download)
LibGen: http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=3CA0A35BFC63B8F531698905...
Both books include many of these specific images.
Much of that work was also taken up under the L5 Society:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society
Though these were pretty widely distributed and publicised at the time, they were not the first realistic or scientific impressions of space colonisation. See for example Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) which, though science fiction, tended to apply much of the best current technical and scientific knowledge and ideas.
- I'l borrow a phrase from the world of finance: past performance is no guarantee of future returns.
Technology and resources are constrained by laws of nature and specific mechanisms of effect. They're not governed by past lucky breaks, though there's a shape to those (Ophuls discusses this, hint: sigmoid functions feature heavily).
He also specifically addresses space-based solar power. I'll refer you to his comments in Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity for that.
My own first encounter with that notion was in T.A. Heppenheimer's Colonies in Space, which I read with wide-eyed enthusiasm shortly after it was first published. My eyes and enthusiasm have narrowed somewhat in the intervening decades.
I've mentioned geothermal previously. Consider that the Yellowstone supercaldera might be good for a few GW of continuous output, at considerable impact to the National Park associated with it. I'm somewhat in favour of that exchange. It's still only a small fraction of present US electrical consumption, though as a reliable baseload / dispatchable source, it would be a valuable contribution.
Tom "Do the Math" Murphy's series exploring various alternatives remains excellent: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/
The super-abundance of solar power (terrestrial, or with the addition of orbital power) still leaves us with a finite energy budget on Earth, if only through thermal shedding. The terrestrial surplus is far less considerable when increasing standards of living for the ~4 billion global poor, another 2-4 billion projected souls by 2100, storage, and ecosystem requirements are considered. It starts cutting quite thin by the time all of these are considered. I've calcualted that bonus as only 20x, not 7,000x, given numerous known practical limitations, and even that is probably exceeding generous. Some of that expressed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21476882
Looking at human population against incident solar power by unit land is interesting:
- I'm pretty sure I also originally saw these images in another 1977 book I checked out from the library as a kid, Colonies in Space: A Comprehensive and Factual Account of the Prospects for Human Colonization of Space, by T. A. Heppenheimer. Here's a link to a 2017 reprint edition: https://www.amazon.com/Colonies-Space-Comprehensive-Prospect...
Pricing on Amazon for new copies seems to be a little fucked, but there are several used copies available for reasonable prices.
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