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White House Wants Ideas For "Bootstrapping a Solar System Civilization"
MarkWhittington writes Tom Kalil, the Deputy Director for Policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Senior Advisor for Science, Technology and Innovation for the National Economic Council, has an intriguing Tuesday post on the OSTP blog. Kalil is soliciting ideas for "bootstrapping a solar system civilization." Anyone interested in offering ideas along those lines to the Obama administration can contact a special email address that has been set up for that purpose. The ideas that Kalil muses about in his post are not new for people who have studied the question of how to settle space at length. The ideas consist of sending autonomous robots to various locations in space to create infrastructure using local resources with advanced manufacturing technology, such as 3D printing. The new aspect is that someone in the White House is publicly discussing these concepts.
Prison colonies!
where did they find oil now?
Solar is ready to bootstrap itself. Just stop helping oil companies distort pricing signals for oil by substituting more and more of it with corn ethanol.
I had high hopes when I read the title that this was related to solar energy...
Start.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Step one: corner the maple syrup market.
Step 1: research on the ISS focused on biosphere components and food production.
Step 2: build a new station to experiment on establishing a small biosphere
Step 3: Expand it to the point that it's food and air sufficient for humans
Step 4: Build a moon base and apply what you learned in LEO to make it self-sufficient
At the same time, work on high efficiency, low reaction mass propulsion systems. This is the real killer. If you can't crack the problem of long distance propulsion systems, we're stuck near earth where we can or make fuel.
That's all I have to say about that.
we figure out how to have a terrestrial civilization first? Doesn't really seem to be working.
they start asking how to get off the planet? Lightweights.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
If we crack this fusion problem, which it looks like we might do in short order, the propulsion problem goes out the window. We become a Type 1 civilization.
Watch this --> http://youtu.be/ZBrPPnyXc58
Fund NASA to explore the advantages (and mitigate issues, such as waste heat) of using fusion in space vehicles. Let's get new designs in play now, so we can get the ball rolling fast when these compact generators are practical and real. Ion thrusters, magnetic fields, life support... having hundreds of megawatts of power makes the entire solar system within reach for manned space travel.
We haven't had boots on the moon since I was a toddler. Make a permanent moon colony. There isn't even a robotic presence on the moon. Seems like it's the perfect place for telescopes.
This is almost the same as asking how we are going to transition to a galactic civilization. From the mile-high-view, quit trying to put humans in places where they have trouble surviving for any period of time. You have to port an ecosystem with you and can still lose it all in a single incident. We haven't even conquered our own biome yet (at least not without a number of side effects). Spaceships with humans is not the answer. Everyone born on Earth will likely die on Earth (with rare exception). This isn't wrong or worrisome insofar as there are no good alternatives yet. System wide or interstellar, it's the same problems at different scales. Ain't nobody helping you halfway between neptune and pluto, nor between the stars.
Durable energy storages that are as simple to fabricate as possible, should be at the top of the list for expansion into the solar system. We basically know what materials are available and what energy sources we can play with. We have long-range communication down to the best case for overriding automation, but our computer science doesn't have a lot of science behind software reliability. One result has been that our automata aren't too bright yet. Let's keep working on understanding the mind while bumping up the work on machine learning. Work on genetics for the far-future possibility of launching biological samples interstellar distances (naturally we will test them in our own solar system first, if we get the chance).
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Have we learned nothing from Bio-dome!?!?
You want to encourage exploration/exploitation of space? Fund NASA and point them in the desired direction..
Fully fund a manned mission to Mars and set a 10 year goal. Dig up a pile of past interplanetary missions and let's start funding them too. Saturn and Jupiter all have possibilities that we need to go look at. How about making a survey of near earth asteroids? What are they made of, is there something there we can use, refine or utilize so we don't have to get it all off the surface of the earth and into orbit? NASA has already suggested all these things and more.
Why are you asking the public for ideas, just FUND NASA and let NASA collect ideas and run with the good ones. All they need is the money....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
How much easier things would be if so many people who could in theory be working towards this goal weren't declining to do so because of questions about whether or not they want to be responsible for exporting humanity to the broader universe. Given our proclivities towards shockingly and appallingly bad behavior, base stupidity, greed, callousness, and the list goes on and on, it's ARROGANCE that any of us think that any of us is worth not only suffering the survival of, but indeed worth the effort of facilitating the spread of humanity beyond the gravitational confines of our crib and playpen.
The White House thinks we're ready to talk about colonizing other worlds? We can't even take care of this one! We can't even manage to care for each other! Sorry to be so pessimistic, but I read the news. On the upside, any aliens we might happen to bump into will be shaped by the same basic forces that shaped us, so when they learn how barberous and stupid humanity is, they'll likely totally understand and think, "sure, we can understand why you're that way... we were like that ourselves, and in many ways, still are."
When budgets grow at NASA or any other bureaucracy, the admin overhead bloats faster than a new iteration of Windows. It's when budgets decline that folks get creative and make spectacular new ways to soft-land something on Mars, for example. So just vote no for socialized space boondoggles.
Seriously, I broke the code, it works. There are a lot of problems integrating modern robotics into useful wholes. Adapting John Von Neumann's work in the 1950's to what we've learned since with Information Science, I have made some theoretical breakthroughs in automation, some as fundamental as adoptiong the use of 1's and 0's was to computing science. The result is an organic whole, enabling self replication to spread across networks of machines, using simple, off the shelf parts and local materials for cheap. It's not just a bootstrap for solar system development, it's a bootstrap for a post-scarcity society.
I'm finishing writing my book and building my prototypes. I have very meagre resources, gladly this system is designed to be cheap. Once my book is complete I plan on realeasing this to the world. Even the first prototypes should be wildly profitable for a very large variety of companies, so I plan on selling DIY kits. I am looking for partners and funding. If you're reading this, Elon Musk, let me know. :-)
NASA is terrible. They take too long to do anything, and are stuck in the mindset that everything needs to be rad-hardened and this and that. Fact is, these guys are eating their lunch for developing interesting stuff in space.
If you consider the concept floated (briefly) in the movie: Aliens, the company simply dropped a large atmospheric processing installation on the planet (LV 426, at that time) and began the terraforming process. That's not substantially different than "sending autonomous robots to various locations in space to create infrastructure using local resources with advanced manufacturing technology, such as 3D printing"
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Indeed! The actual key in our current generation is to provide consistent direction and funding to NASA. As it is, every president comes in, makes some big talk about the Moon or Mars or something, no resources are allocated, and the next president in line makes a different set of commitments.
A framework for a large-scale goal that is capable of withstanding our political situation is the thing we lack.
-- "Oh. This guy again."
A 'SimCity' CAD design game (for reg, underground, undersea & space complete living-working spaces.)
What a great opportunity.
Let's take the creative power I've seen in youtube game video such as minecraft and simcity and put that to work.
A simcity type CAD system which allows underground, undersea, and space components with realistic resource needs accessible to other computer analysis.
One the program is designed well, include an interface which would allow others to implement neuro-evolutionary or other weirdly cool PhD computer design research and shit.
An entire education system could be designed around such a tool. Tangents of 'water' resources, as well as most standard scientific concepts. A well designed system would introduce a simplified versions to younger children.
So next will be getting that stuff into space, and for that you build a 'orbital canon' .. space stations, etc. (Will need to work on high-G equipment launch technology, but will need lower G launch vehicles designed and build by NASA or private contractors.
Let's let that be the start. Let me know if you would like more.
Thanks for asking.
Yes, but by the time anyone reads your post, that number will be up to six cases.
And by the time anyone reads this post, that number will be up to seven cases.
So if the White House is building a rocket in Area 57 to take mine shaft gap folks into outer space, to, um, "re-spawn" civilization . . . maybe they know something about Ebola that we don't . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Unless you have a few trillion dollar coins stashed away somewhere that'll fund thousands upon thousands of chemical rockets, it's just not possible to do this. The only hope we have of actually getting to a place like Mars, or even the Moon, on a large scale (even with sufficient economic incentive to be there) would be new physics or a wild breakthrough in engineering, at least 30dB more than a re-usable SpaceX rocket would be. There's no guarantee that the former is even possible, and there is a guarantee that the latter won't happen without lots of deep thinking and hard work that needs an economic incentive to be worth-while, because it'll be very expensive and involve lots and lots of failure along the way. You can't force it, and you can't afford it, even if you confiscate everyone's possessions and tax everyone's income at 100%.
How about having a civilization right here where all the people and things are?
I was thinking the same thing. Does this mean we are screwed>?
there is no real interest in making this happen. unless they can get serious funding ($100B or so) from the anti-science brigade called Congress to invest in actually carrying out such a mission, they are just wasting our time with banter.
fuck Congress and fuck your military centric budget.
" send autonomous robots to various locations in space to create infrastructure using local resources with advanced manufacturing technology, such as 3D printing"
So we send robots to terraform and prepare a new habitat for humans.
Eventually, after many years, the robots send us a message that says "Everything is ready. We are waiting to meet you all for dinner."
Anyone see a problem with this?
NASA is terrible. They take too long to do anything,
Yet, they actually do something.
Once companies takes pictures of Neptune or puts a man on the moon, I'll be suitably impressed.
Until then, they're leeches riding on NASAs skirt, playing around in LEO using NASA-derived designs, and not pushing any boundaries except executive bonuses.
I wish I could believe he was serious.
What else is there to say. When I've been lied to enough I stop believing. Sometimes cynical is just realistic.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I'm sorry but NASA is a bloated bureaucracy. Just throwing money at it and letting it do whatever it wants would be a horrible idea.
However NASA did pretty good recently with the fixed-price contracts to private companies (SpaceX) for specific targets. We need more of these. Kill the cost plus defense industry contracts, kill the SLS and everyone connected with that clusterfuck, completely neuter Congress so that indivdual congresscritters looking for pork barrel have no influence on any project whatsoever.
We get *this* planet civilized first...?
Why would I want the US to have ANYTHING to do with managing the solar system? They can't even properly manage their own pocket of earth.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before. And fuck them up, too.
Don't let any form of rabid American crony capitalism near it!
Current laws make it difficult to justify capitalism when it is known that the results of your efforts may be disallowed. Add the total uncertainty of tax treatment and you have 2 strikes. Add regulatory uncertainty 3 strikes. Hope may spring eternal, but big money investors would like a reasonable chance of return.
Tax dollars could fund prizes, research etc. but governments incentives are frequently little more than politically motivated distractions that distort the marketplace by specifying "how" not "what".
Promise a contract of x number of pounds delivered into LEO for y dollars (gold equivalent) by the year 2025 and you might get something more useful out of your public funding.
Promised contracts for other infrastructure advances -- energy, food, water, education, medicine, etc. could have dramatic economic impacts that would certainly help support space exploration as well as improve things on the ground.
Proper Incentives to solve social issues would also be very positive: curing generational welfare dependency, curing various forms of addiction, preventing crime.
Stopping negative incentives which abound in government -- e.g. war on drugs, huge amounts of money spent, direct and indirect. Say you like using cocaine, limited use may not be destructive at all. But if the behavior is destructive, there is a problem. Can you make it non-addictive, maybe never; we could change policies to limit the destructiveness. The criminal treatment is clearly not working too well for society as a whole. Crony capitalism? Comcast is an exemplar hate by liberals and conservative (though politicians benefit, the public does not). Lots of other possible examples. All of these waste money here and now, freeing up the capital to do better things would clearly help transition to a space economy.
I've ranted long enough.
Nothing will happen until you can build and loft a real power source that can generate hundreds of megawatts of energy to drive the ships and once there, power the outposts.
Solar can be part of that but putting up a solar farm to generate enough power to provide for an actual colony would take hundreds of tons of material as compared to a compact nuke or a fusion device like recently discussed by Lockheed. Think Nuke Sub reactors.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Many of our manufacturing staples: engines, refrigeration, microwave ovens etc are "good" but not "robust".
We will need air scrubbers, heaters, chillers and ventilation systems for air quality. And liquid recycling systems for, well, waste water and gray water processing. There once was a vibrant research path in Closed Loop Environmental Support Systems. Start those up again.
In order to live in space, we need to be able to survive. We will need better and more reliable technologies than we have today. Our current space station is in our bubble, inside the Van Allen belts, we "really" need to move out to the wild west of the general solar system in order to test our ability to survive.
President and Congress direct NASA to carry out such and such programs but fail to provide enough budget. Yes, same whiney post like everyone else.
mfwright@batnet.com
4 years ago: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
From there:
My suggestion for a "Game Changing" project is that NASA (possibly in partnership with NIST) could coordinate a global effort towards designing and deploying self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore (developed under free and open source non-proprietary licenses as progress towards "open manufacturing").
NASA showed the basic technological feasibility of this with work in the late 1970s on space habitats, and also in a 1980 study called "Advanced Automation for Space Missions".
In a long-term space mission or a space settlement, a self-sustaining economy must be created and supported. Therefore, addressing the problem of technological fragility on Earth due to long supply lines and the inaccessibility of key manufacturing data (because it is considered proprietary) is an essential step in the development of the development of human settlement in space. Addressing such fragility would have immediate benefits to improve intrinsic and mutual security globally, and would help humanity survive in the face of plagues, wars, global climate change, asteroid strikes, earthquakes, and whatever other disasters might strike unexpectedly. As the loss of New Orleans showed, Mother Nature remains a formidable adversary even when people are not fighting amongst themselves over perceived scarce resources.
A NASA-coordinated effort to organize manufacturing information and use it to design such habitats (or seeds that would grow such habitats), as well as improve the state-of-the-art in collaboration software, could thus help meet needs both currently on Earth and in the future in space.
Nothing NASA is doing now compares with this at all in terms of gaining the excitement and participation of the world's technologists and technically-minded youth, given this project would have the scale of the entire FOSS movement applied to manufacturing (and simulation). Achieving this goal of a self-replicating space habitat could justify literally trillions of dollars in effort to create a technological infrastructure that could support quadrillions of human lives in space, making nonsense of current worries of "Limits to Growth" or "Peak Oil" or "Overpopulation" or whatever else.
While NASA could coordinate this effort, many other organizations including NIST (and its SLIM program), DARPA, universities, and manufacturers globally could also participate in this effort.
As a whole, this project would help increase US security as a sort of public outreach by helping the global security community transcend ironic and outdated visions of what security means, given that so much abundance is possible through modern technology and this NASA effort would demonstrate that:
"Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
See here for more details:
http://groups.google.com/group...?
This effort could also be done in conjunction with this other proposal I made:
"Build 21000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA "
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Politicians often discover that when the issue they wish to move forward is resisted by their peers, they can appeal directly to the public. Explain their plan and encourage input from everyone. If they build enough support among the voters, then their peers may be forced to support the plan as well.
Kalil may or may not have support from the White House or anyone, but if he gets a big response to this challenge Obama and others will have to reconsider their reluctance.
Yes, ask the Public, ask schoolchildren in particular. Five million responses from fifth graders is a force to sway elected officials. Furthermore it inspires a new generation to reach for the stars (and distracts them from daily news of terrorists and disease).
[I offer this as a tactic for those who support this sort of thing. I am not convinced that colonizing planets is in our best interest at this time.]
...omphaloskepsis often...
"bootstrapping a solar system civilization with no additional money"
FTFY.
Or we could just talk about it. This way there's more money left over for bombing people half-way across the globe.
Funny, I was on a White House tour this summer and they still use incandescent light bulbs inside the White House. Switching to LED lights might be a good place to start.
Invent a space drive. The UFO space aliens already have one. Rockets equal failure.
...funnel money to donors who then go bankrupt shortly after...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
We need a good analogy to get started. Trying to set a space habitat set up is like...
Now it is China that is steadily building a stairway to the moon, while America focuses on a few scientific projects that are charismatic, but underfunding science in general.
1) Destroy instutionalized education and rebuild it with features like Oh, I don't know...how about not penalizing people who think differently and degrees based on contribution to society and not paper exams?
2) How about not destroying our economic base by giving bankers hundreds of trillions in benefits for raping society and well, maybe using that money to build something we need...like a new propulsion tech not based on Newtonian Physics?
I would be willing to bet with 17 trillion dollars that the Bankers go we could probably do something interesting....like open the entire resource base of the solar system to a growing humanity with lots of problems.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
but I won't, that you need to start with funding. Maybe the government should ask the federal reserve to share some of the interest made on their filthy artificial economy. How about we bootstrap waisted lobbyists money to a cat's belly then a butter side up slice of toast to its back.
Ass wipes butt fuckers never deserved to live and ask this shit!
Hay. When Obama is dead, will anyone cry! Hell no.
Serves 'em right for nuking Dallas just so he can jack-off on Monday.
We've seen this move before. Failing presidents love to propose stuff that they know won't happen in their lifetime. That way, they can't be accused of failure until everyone's forgotten them.
If you really want to accomplish something, you set your sights on something that can happen within a decade, like Kennedy did with a man on the moon.
When you go beyond that, you have no guarantees that some future President Jackoff will think that space exploration is against God's will and shut the whole thing down.
You are welcome on my lawn.
1. Light gas gun to get mass preferably h2o into orbit at the lowest $/lbs possible. Opens up fuel, water, and food off world.
2. Some type of lift system: space fountain, space elevator, sky hook chain, or ???
3. Inflatable habitats.
4. Large linear accelerator, e.g. two spinning rocks with a cable in between.
5. IXian no-ships
6. Diaspora
7. Golden Path
Let people launch rockets. It's against FAA regulations to do it, if someone wants to be a rugged solar system colonist, then it's their right to exercise that.
We're having problems to make an Earth civilization. Unless we can make a really great non-aggression treaty, this will not end well... something like what was done in Antarctica.
Actually, because of Space, it's probably a very good idea for the most powerful nations (read UN Security Council permanent members plus other Space-capable nations like India, Japan etc.) to start working on such general lines. A good idea would be not having members from military corporations from each country, but instead doing it via UN, so that there would be UN astronauts -- not American, Russian or Chinese.
That would be a first step.
Tell everyone you're going to war with MARS.
Memo to White House: how about tending to our Ebola problem for right now, okay?
1. Universal human rights, including access to clean water and food, or at least arable land and the means to grow food crops.
2. Universal and complete economic and social human equality.
3. Ending (at least virtually) all sickness and disease.
4. Non fossil-fuel-based energy technology.
Once we lick all that we can go out to the other planets and beyond. There would be nothing left to stop us.
Let's be civilized here on Earth first..
Provide low-cost federal insurance for colonization and asteroid mining missions, like we do for nuclear power plants.
Play Command HQ online
Maybe the White House should focus their efforts and PR campaigns on battling Ebola?
To be fair, they are pushing economics boundaries. Which are the only boundaries really holding us back from colonizing the system (and then galaxy).
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
A good start would be to actually fund a space agency to do space work. It's just a thought...
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Yeah that whole rover to Mars things was a waste of time while that 4 trillion F-35 was wise spending. Quit being a fucking moron.
If we can build a self-sufficient orbital environment we don't need to go anywhere because we can make the destination wherever we please. i.e. the ship is as good as it gets anyway as far as the best environment for life. We just need to be able to send robots to collect elements and process it into parts for more habitat ships.
Who needs planets when your ship is large enough to survive forever by recycling and reconstructing itself? And if you have fusion power, as we seem to now have thanks to Lockheed, we can just keep making these mobile habitats until all the available mass in the solar system is consumed. Only then do we need to expand to other star systems, but long before then our robots would have reached them and started sending back materials to expand our habitats even further.
In the far future we may need to look at moving everything to a star that has a much longer life than our sun, if we can find one that is also stable enough.
The White House wants input on a solar system civilization? Wait is there an election coming up soon? This sounds a lot like Democrats pandering with no real intention of doing anything.
... no token blacks....
Load up a comet with some snot and shoot them in every direction. Few million years later and a new generation of earthlings will be roaming a far away planet thinking how they can colonize a distant planet.
The subject line says it all, but just to clarify it a bit more, the global power requirement for 2020 is projected to be under 22 TW (we use 20 TW or so right now, depending on how you measure it).
In contrast, mean solar insolation on the planet is around 150,000 TW at ground level. It doesn't take a mathematical genius to work out from this that our civilization's power needs are completely insignificant compared to the power arriving from the Sun, by orders of magnitude.
Of course we can't harness those 150,000 TW, but 22 TW could be captured using very little acreage (0.015% of the Earth's surface) in any sunny desert, and there are lots of those available. Only a tiny fraction would be needed.
So, I don't know where someone got the idea that solar energy cannot meet our needs, it's so hugely wrong that it's funny.
But wait, the above figures are at ground level . Do you realize how much power could be harnessed in Low Earth Orbit and beamed down safely at low power density? (Design studies for this have already been made.) The amount of power available in LEO is so mind-blowingly enormous that doing a calculation becomes completely pointless. It's astronomic. And we don't have to stop at LEO.
Sorry to burst the bubble of your misconceptions, but you're wrong. Solar energy is, for all human intents and purposes, limitless.
Send people, send people, send people. Let them figure out how to live there. Let the ones who stay behind figure out how to keep them alive. EVERYTHING else is a distraction and an excuse not to do it. These people might mean well, but they don't have a clue. They still have an Apollo era hero astronaut idea of how things work. Combine that to the modern "we-can't-send-people-to-Mars-until-we-develop-an-unending-series-of-new-crap" ideas, and nothing will happen. Again. Sigh.
It is all just empty, boring talk. Again.
"the Deputy Director for Policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Senior Advisor for Science, Technology and Innovation for the National Economic Council" Does that even fit on a business card?
Fusion and the following are some of the current research being conducted in this area.
There are others, but the above are the main ones.
.
The other being Molten Salt Reactors in particular Liquid Thorium Floride Reactors
And if you do not have one of the above you can forget about creating a space civilisation, let alone saving mankind from a fate worse than death.
The more I know, the less I know
ELYSIUM IS NIGH :O
Why not use the same way they was used in colonised the planet 500 years ago. With the best endeavour ships were constructed and people got on for the new lands. Some didn’t make it, some new towns didn’t make it, but humans did and we now colonise the whole planet
As a baby-boomer, still waiting for my toga and flying car [and unlimited leisure with good pay], I love this.
However I think a clear sub-text is that the 'powers that be' have finally realised that we're fucking this planet over and we're going to need a few other places. No apologies for the language, it's an accurate description of what we're doing.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Such a device would be helpful, if not critical, for the success of colonies away from Earth. It doesn't matter if it's not very efficient, as long as it works, since it could help expand the colonies power generating facilities, life support, etc., and it's probably easier to outfit a colony with a big power supply than with all the chemical products in might possibly need.
That one Lockheed Martin project which went 100% over budget and years behind schedule is so much better than that other Lockheed Martin project which went several 100% over budget and years behind schedule.
I don't find such statements credible unless they put the money where their mouth is on the issue. If they blew what they've blown on the war on drugs on the space program we'd have a colony on mars. Think about that.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The best suggestions I have heard consist of two things:
- Clearly defined X-Prizes for private industry: First company to achieve X receives Y prize money, second company receives fraction-of-Y. The total cost of the X-prizes will be a tiny fraction of what a bureaucratic government effort would cost.
- Remove as many regulations as possible from private industry - let it be a "wild west". Example: plenty of people want to volunteer for high-risk space missions. Currently, worker-safety regulations cannot be disregarded, no matter how many waivers the people sign. Get rid of that - as long as people know what they're signing up for, the government should stay out of it.
The de-regulation bit also includes lots of other things. Just as an example, the endless environmental impact assessments required before you can build a launch facility. There are mountains of regulations that stand firmly in the way of actually making progress in space...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I don't think we can make a spaceship large enough to hold congress and the supreme court at this time. Your idea will have to wait.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
We can't even keep the atmosphere on our planet clean. We certainly can't manage to live on other planets. We're going to have to teach our people not to shit where they eat before they're ready to go into space
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Launching everything we need from Earth is too expensive.
True! And yet for 50 years, I could never help noticing, we have de-orbited everything we've sent up! It seems as though noone has given any thought to making things we spend $$$$$ billions and billions $$$$ putting up there so that it will be useful in the future.
It wasn't that long ago that they were talking about de-orbiting the ISS in 2016 !! Gosh, I wonder if there's anything long-lasting enough in the ISS that might be useful later. Gosh, maybe Henry Ford was ONTO something when he discovered standardization of parts. LEGO seems to have figured out how to make a whole lot of stuff work together. Maybe they could hire LEGO.
Huh. I wonder if a plan would be possible. If there were only a bunch of smart guys sitting around in fancy government buildings looking for something challenging to do something that lasts longer than the next election. Instead of looking for more ways to throw more money into the Right pockets.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
The problem isn't space. The problem is zero-G.
So you can make a ring and spin it. You can hollow out an asteroid and spin it. Or, presuming you have lots of power, you can simply accelerate in some direction and then decelerate the other way. Any of those ways, the zero-G problems can be made to go away. It's an engineering problem, not a show-stopping, unbeatable environmental problem.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Step 1: Build permanent habitation in orbit. In a way that can easily be converted to a "space dock".
Step 2: Use it as a launch pad for permanent habitation on the Moon. Build the infrastructure, build large (mega-engineering projects). Once it's done, THEN move people in permanently. Use this method as the basis for expansion elsewhere in the solar system.
Step 3: Once permanent habitation has been done within Earth-orbit, send out automated devices to construct a similar space dock in Mars orbit, and possibly one in Venus orbit.
Step 4: Use the Mars dock as a launch pad for permanent habitation on Mars using the Moon's habitation as a template. Due to Venus' EXTREMELY unfriendly atmosphere, I'd likely say convert the Venus station into a solar power-to-battery facility.
Step 5: Once the Moon and Mars colonies are firmly established, use the template for occupying the moons of the outer planets.
Basically the orbital facilities would be staging areas for occupation of the various planets/moons. They serve as fall-back points in case of catastrophe. And, once the colony was safely established, they'd become fuel depots.
Going with a "launch from orbit" model also saves fuel and wear and tear on interplanetary vehicles.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Oh, that Obama! The only President ever to play golf while in office.
Ask the guys who make Fischertechnik instead. LEGO ist mostly for architects (with a little bit of engineering stuff thrown in); Fischertechnik is solely for engineers.
They should start with a List of what they DO have, rather than asking for all suggestions.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Millennial-Project-Colonizing-Galaxy/dp/0316771635
Everyone is cracking jokes, or discussing how it can be accomplished, but has anyone wondered why the interest all of the sudden? Do they know something that we don't?
If it does have this "critical mass" of assets, it has the potential to grow exponentially.
You want to encourage exploration/exploitation of space? Allow ownership of territory on bodies of the solar system. First organization to establish a manned colony for one year owns wherever that colony is, up to an area of 10 million square miles.
.. and are questionable boot strapping projects.
The biggest cost and therefore barrier to Space exploration is launch costs. These needs to be side stepped.
Launch a design prize for low cost probes to be sent in their dozens, hundreds or perhaps even
thousands to the asteroid belt on low energy transfer trajectories. These need to include cheap & reliable ways to analyse the asteroids for useful materials.
Have a second round to design low cost extraction 'bots' to follow up the analysis probes to 'mine' those materials. These could hoard the supplies or even again use low energy transfer to Earth/Lunar Lagrangian points.
Sell futures to fund the next step based on the value of those materials.
We don't need (and probably don't want) full functional Von Neumann machines.
Oh, the hibris of politicians. Once self-sufficient space colonies exist, it is highly unlikely terrestrial governments will have any hold on them. There will be a solar system civilization, but the USG will not be a part of it for long.
Lawyers in space. ASAP. All of them. /idea>
And it's pretty cool:
The integrated space plan is an update of the document originally drawn up in the 1980s, and has been variously rediscovered since.
It's a long-view look at where we need to go and what we need to get there. In the 1980s, commercial spaceflight was envisioned somewhat differently than it's happened, and robotics have gotten way more capable, so the refresh is definitely needed.
some nutjob blogger with a plan (and a budget) to train space marines at 1.5G so they can kick everybody's butt
Just monitor, inspect, learn and regulate. Keep an eye on the heavens. Find out what's out there. Just don't try to do anything proactive because you'll screw it up. Not only will you waste huge piles of money to accomplish nothing of lasting value, you'll mess it up for everyone else - and for a long time to come.
And pay people well.
Easiest way to colonize the solar system would be to take some existing life like bacteria and the basic building blocks of life, and just ship them to mars. Then hope that life can survive and spread in mars. Then wait 100000 years to see what happens.
Wait, don't downvote me yet!
Think about it. "Science" can't absolutely disprove an intelligent creator (I know, my school curriculum told me so). Populating Earth was done by someone, right?
It costs nothing, and we don't have to lift a finger ourselves. Let's pray, and the creator will just do it again, somewhere else, right?
Why are you looking at me like that?
This article argues that Elon Musk is in many ways like Werner Von Braun or the Soviet scientist Sergei Korolev (who pushed the Soviets into space). One thing I got from this article was that the original and primary motivation for building rockets was to make weapons. Von Braun and Kovolev almost singlehandedly pushed their own countries into building rockets to put people into space. Without them, we might not have had satellites as quickly or at all. Placing satellites into orbit and putting humans into orbit was once considered crazy. American government officials considered Von Braun to be eccentric, but they didn't care as long as he gave them better ICBM's. Now our entire civilization is built around satellite technology, and our moon shots have brought us technology advances such as the microchip.
When we talk about putting more humans it can sound a little crazy. However I don't think it is any more crazy than having people climb Mt. Everest, having bases in Antarctica, or sending three small ships westward into the unknown ocean to find a new world. We humans have an inbuilt desire to explore. To ignore that is to go against our fundamental nature.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Well, it *is* a competition, but that doesn't mean that everyone can't be winners, some will just win more than others. And the first group to develop viable technology will have a first-mover advantage, even if the competition piggybacks on their research. There are after all "magic" spots in the solar system that are far more valuable than the rest, and the first major government-backed group to colonize them will likely be able to make their claims stick, international treaties be damned. Some examples:
The Peaks of Eternal Light, the only places on the moon where solar power is available continuously.
Lunar glaciers - water is a valuable and heavy resource in space, and there's only a few known
The closest point on the moon, and Earth-moon L1 point - the combination of which is one of only two regions where you can build a lunar space elevator, and the only one where the far tip can potentially match the tangential velocity of Earth's surface.
The Earth-moon L4 and L5 points - the most energetically accessible spots from the moon, and hence prime real estate for space colonies built with lunar resources.
The Earth-sun L4 and L5 points - home of the most energetically accessible asteroids from Earth, ideal for early asteroid development, and a potential site for long-term space colonies that want to maintain easy contact with Earth.
And of course if we're talking asteroid colonization, not all asteroids are created equal - it will be a race to locate and claim the largest and richest candidates. Likewise on planets there will be competition for the most resource-rich areas.
Oh, and two more - the moons of Mars. Really just huge asteroids, but they would make excellent massive space stations around a planet that will likely one day have it's own thriving economy, and are small enough that a dedicated enough actor could likely claim the whole thing early on.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Shavano has it. We have yet to create a successful closed biosphere here on earth. Until we can do so we will be limited to robotic exploration.
"Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?"
"Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature. "
Kalil: is that, perhaps, pronounced "Kal-El"?
Easy: first build several *real* space stations, not "outposts in space", that serve the same way airports do, and use orbit-to-orbit ships - true spacegoing vessels. Once those are up, interplanetary travel is *much* cheaper.
Then we build the magelev launchers on the Moon....
mark
Because it would magically be replaced with people who are less selfish and corrupt?
Maybe the idea is to go somewhere without a millennia-long history of greed, corruption and dogma.
targeted support groups. This is normal Obama campaign behavior. The administration that has done everything it possibly could to slow manned spaceflight within the bounds of the law now wants to activate that tiny slice of their base that cares about spaceflight. They have been making very narrowly targeted statements to many other interest groups lately too... all in the name of trying to eek out that last .1% of voters and try to save the senate. They did the same thing in 2008. In 2008, Obama campaigned with teachers and promised to delay NASA activities by 5 years and shift the money to education - then he went to Florida and promised the KSC workforce that he was going to speed-up the post-shuttle program (which at that time was "Constellation" - the program he killed in 2010) to "close the gap" between shuttle flights and the following program flights. A lot of people around KSC fell for the lie and voted for Obama - only to get their lay-off notices over the follwing 24 months.
Mr Obama's NASA has actively DISABLED manned Mars missions in the near term and probably any time in the next half-century. ANY such manned mission will require multiple heavy lift launch vehicle launches in quick succession, but each launch trashes the pad and requires many days of repair. The KSC launch complex 39 was designed to have 5 pads but only 2 were ever built (39-A and 39-B) which was sufficient for the Apollo moon program but an absolute minimum for a Mars program. Under Mr Obama, only one pad (39-B) is being prepped for SLS launches that could support Mars missions but the other pad (39-A) has just been leased to SpaceX and they are prepping it to host the Falcon9H (NOT a heavy lifter). Conclusion: No matter WHAT "team Obama" SAYS, it has ruled-out manned Mars missions and has tried to lock-in policies that will prevent the next administration from going to Mars too.
Twenty odd countries with "space programs" but no one has the means to put a human on the moon any more (which people did in the 60's!).
Everyone gets more and more ambitious with their goals while related capabilities are being lost forever.
Apologies to the Draper watchers: we really had it better back then.
Anyway, I'd rather keep *my* tax dollars on the earth so I can spend it on my kids and not the religious pursuit of Science.
Once plants, animals, and people can survive off of moon dust and rocks and breath helium, then things start to get easier.
Fully fund a manned mission to Mars and set a 10 year goal.
Don't think it's possible actually. There's simply too much stuff that still needs to be worked out. Heavy launchers haven't even shown up yet. After that we still had to work out long term deep space habitats that despite the knowledge to even try and build them will take a while to work out the engineering bugs and get them good enough that they'll work for a two and half year trip away from help. Once we actually get to Mars, there is a whole series of problems with getting something capable of carrying a man down to the surface and back due to an atmosphere that isn't quite thick enough to help us and too thick to ignore. Apollo 1 didn't take men to the moon and the first in the Mars mission series won't take people to Mars.
We need testing. Just launch wave after wave of monkeys into space and hope they tell us something. Give them funny hats.
We're being told that decriminalizing drugs would bring in the big bucks. Let's put that theory to the test: make it official that the US won't object to drugs in outer space. Whether it's a short suborbital flight or a permanent moonbase, as long as you're in space, you can space out.
First organization to establish a manned colony for one year owns wherever that colony is, up to an area of 10 million square miles.
I think you mean, first person to set up space snipers to ward off the competition, gets all the space territory they want.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
It's easy, just stop trying to control everything. get your stupid regulations out of our way and let us invent.
What a great idea! And we all know how justified it is by this administration's endless series of massive successes with every project they undertook. Why, just imagine how well GOINGINTOSPACE.gov would work and how cheaply it could be done - and that's just a start!
Not giving any of them to Obama.
A good starting point would be to offer the IS people an Islamic Caliphate in some of the heavenly bodies of our solar system... and not in just any of these heavenly body but it in most important one!! As a sign of our love and appreciation we could offer them a Caliphate in de Sun.
And why wait? we should start right now!
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Sounds to me as if Mr. Kalil wants a pony before he can take care of a hamster. I suggest that he first understand the implications of the exponential function and why growth as we know it today has an expiration date. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Tom Murphy: Growth has an Expiration Date You can follow Tom on his blog at http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
that someone official is talking about this. And not just the Planetary Society for once.
To colonise space domes and biospheres will never work we need to construct underground not citys under a dome.Domes leak far to easily everything must be compartmentalised to handle fire,decompression,armoshiric contamination etc.food should be grown in air locked compartments with controlled separate environments with humidity,frequency of light,temperature and barometric pressure all controlled for optimum crop yields.built like track housing all with separate controlled environments.robot tending and harvesting equipment mounted above, insect,fungus,algae, and yeast farming in addition to plants. underground construction shields against radiation and minimizes risk from asteroid impacts even on mars mostly underground makes sense, it would help keep out the co2 atmosphere, control fire outbreaks,allow population control during social disturbances, and in addition to shielding from solar radiation,it would insulate making keeping people and farming warm enough while using far less energy. on the moon and mars i would use electromagnetic railing to accelerate shuttles, cargo etc. into orbit like up the side of Olympus Monds to very high speeds to reduce fuel needed for orbit. on our moon and the 2 martian moons rail acceleration alone could launch intersolar ships and satellites through out our system. As far as deep space probes, we need to shield against cosmic rays so the best way to send probes to other star systems would be to mine out a small asteroid line it internally with 21-25 ft of lead for shielding cover it in optical, infrared, ultraviolet,radio,x-ray and gamma ray telescopes, laser and radio communications arrays,lidar and radar all for navigation and exploration,fusion power with back up fission reactors preferably of a breeder reactor design to maximize fuel.fusion plasma rockets for initial acceleration, followed by sling shot maneuvers and ion engines there after for both fuel efficiency and its slow but steady continued exponential acceleration. in addition to incredibly redundant construction of all systems, including advanced computer systems with the best A.I. we can manage. dozens of probe satellites to explore planets and other anomalies of interest in the target star systems. we could also build in space an electromagnetic accelerator to launch in system cargo and satellites to planets and moons throughout the sol system. we should build buried colonies on every moon in our system in addition to mars,pluto and mercurys cool side. On moons space elevators could also be used for moving people and cargo.Space stations inside asteroids, built like the deep space probe with living quarters,food production,power,shuttle bays,cargo bays etc. could be built throughout the system, and some could be put in gravity null zones between moons and planets were gravity equalizes, especially in earth orbit combined with a lunar space elevator to the asteroid station. all bases should have lead shield shelters for radiation stormes. electromagnetic accelerators could help launch frop earth as well reducing the energy and cost to orbit.imagine accelerating up the side ov everest to hundreds of miles an hour than the rockets take over at the top in the thin atmosphere, allowing huge payloads to be launched at far cheaper costs.underground farming on earth would enable us to farm anywhere and to stack the underground fars vertically with many levels, free from the vagaries of temperature rainfall and inclement weather and insect and animal predation. hydroponics and aeroponics produce 4 acres of food per acre,being totally organic, pesticide and pest free. we too on earth could benefit from insect,fungus,algae,and yest food farming.underground aquaponics would be able to prevent pollution and parasite problems,and solar collectors and fiberoptically transmitted light from the surface to the underground farms,could also provide both power and light and act as a solar power plant. underground housing is also cheaper to heat and cool and is usually like 70 degrees year round without heating or cooling. it is also
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Yet another "Ready, Fire, Aim" sally from the blind, deaf and dumb contingent. Please DO go on, it's absolutely fascinating. :)
You might start with your definition of a "libshit"; is that a left winger? A libertarian? A librarian? What?
Also, I was dreadfully sorry to learn that your sense of humor was shot off in the war.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Once we give up our meatbag bodies, a lot of the physics problems go away.
Admittedly, the tech to upload our brains into computers is a ways off, but it doesn't require amazing physics breakthroughs to get there (eg. wormholes, antigravity, FTL travel etc.).
We can send our computer brains off the planet at much higher Gs, not have to worry too much about flight time to other solar systems, and can grow and download back into meatbags at the final destination if we still desire such things.
Title aside, I hate the movie - dude, why didn't you just make multiple backups of yourself?
Put comet rocks into a microwave oven to collect metals to build more microwave ovens! http://www.instructables.com/id/microwave-smelter/