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We Need To Build Industrial Zones In Space In Order To Save Earth, Says Jeff Bezos (cnbc.com)
Onstage at the Code Conference, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said that we have to start bringing parts of the industrial economy to space in order to "save Earth." Bezos also said that we must protect our planet, adding that we don't want to live in a retrograde world where "we have to freeze population growth." From the report: Bezos says tasks that require lots of energy shouldn't be handled on Earth. Instead, we should perform them in space, and that will happen within the next few hundred years. "Energy is limited here. In at least a few hundred years... all of our heavy industry will be moved off-planet," Bezos added. "Earth will be zoned residential and light industrial. You shouldn't be doing heavy energy on earth. We can build gigantic chip factories in space." Solar energy, for instance, is more practical for factories in space, he said. "We don't have to actually build them here," he said. "The Earth shades itself, [whereas] in space you can get solar power 24/7. ... The problem with other planets ... people will visit Mars, and we will settle Mars, and people should because it's cool, but for heavy industry, I would actually put it in space."
Elon Musk wants us to build human colonies on Mars. Jeff Bezos has a slightly more measured take.
I don't think the author of the article understands what "measured" means.
People criticize the colonization of Mars as unrealistic, but most of those plans involve making things destined for Martian consumption on Mars itself and using martian materials. Say what you will about Mars, but it's a whole planet. There's always building materials within easy reach, if you're not too picky about their specific composition
But as others have noted, Bezos's plan pretty much presupposes that every raw material that goes into every orbital factory has had a rocket strapped to it at some point, to bring it either from the surface of the Earth or from somewhere else in the solar system. That's got to be a hell of a freight charge.
So no, I don't think Bezos did a whole lot of "measurement" before opining on things. It's called talking out of your ass. I do it, you do it, everybody does it. The right thing to do is just to ignore it, even when a billionaire does it.
The thing is, while dissipating energy from your cold junctions on Earth is dead easy -- convection, conduction, evaporation into the atmosphere -- the only option you have in space is radiation. And that translates into enormous fields of radiating surfaces, probably with channels to carry some sort of working fluid, and shading from the Sun. It's not going to be as easy as you imply.
Really? Littered?
Anything organic? Pretty much no (trace amounts at best).
Therefore petroleum, oils, etc. are out of the question.
Metals? Not really. Again, apart from iron, it's more energy to find, capture and refine than it's worth.
Useful gases? Chemicals? Apart from a couple of outliers, and again subject to discovering them in the mostly-vacuum of the solar system, not really.
Although technically silicon chips are "made of rocks", you can't just pick up these things. And they are hard to find, extremely hard to capture, even more difficult to alter the course of (especially in bulk) and almost impossible to "stop". Fuck, we can barely land ON island-size lumps of rock with missions that take decades to get in place to do so. Let alone shoving it to the right place with destroying everything, breaking it down and reusing some trace element inside it.
Raw materials are in SHORT supply up there. Pretty much the only ubiquitous thing is radiation of one form or another (i.e. energy, even if it's "light"). At, to be honest, we don't really have shortages of that when you consider the uranium in the planet (oh, look, an entire FUCKING PLANET and we barely have enough uranium to be bothered digging through it to get to it).
Bezos runs a rocket company (besides Amazon.com). I'm sure he has people who can tell him to 3 significant figures how much energy is needed. I can too, 31.273 MJ/kg. I do space systems engineering, and it's one of the basic facts you learn. At wholesale electric rates, that comes to $0.43/kg, about what I pay for a bag of potatoes. The fact that current launch prices are at least 3,800 times higher just means *we're doing it wrong* and are terribly inefficient at it.
> the tons of raw metals and other materials that you would need for industrial operations.
Those tons are already in space, on the Moon and nearby asteroids. There is plenty of solar energy in orbit to process those materials. And you can bootstrap industry via the Seed Factory concept (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Seed_Factories). That's where you send a starter set of machines, and use them to make *more* machines out of local materials already in space. Once your production capacity is big enough, you start making products for sale.
> Thought experiment: you use nice pretty reflectors to smelt aluminium. You now have a ball (or, more likely, an expanding cloud) of +/- 700C molten metal.
Actually, extracting Aluminum is more complicated than just heating, since most of that metal everywhere (Earth and space) is in the form of oxide minerals. However Iron in the form of metallic asteroids *is* available already reduced to metal, so I will substitute that in my discussion. You build a rotating circular crucible and throw chunks of metallic asteroid into it. Focus enough sunlight on it to melt the batch. Bits of rocky inclusions will float to the "top" (center) because they are less dense, and the molten iron will sink to the "bottom" (rim). Throw in a bit of carbon from the C-type asteroids, since Iron + Carbon = steel. The bottom of your crucible has a hole that you tap to extrude the molten metal, which then passes through cooled rollers to provide a final shape. On Earth this is called "continuous casting". The rollers can form an "H" shape for structural beams, flat sheet, or whatever else you need, by just choosing roller positions. Cooling water goes through the rollers, and out to radiator pipes. They don't have to cool to room temperature, just enough to keep the rollers from deforming. Since the radiators will be rejecting heat at a pretty high temperature, they don't have to be very large.
> I'm not saying we should shitcan the whole idea, but the "Futurist" camp really has to stop talking about how trivial things are once we get most of the way out of the gravity well,
Actual space systems engineers like myself don't trivialize the tasks. Most space enthusiasts don't even know what materials are available to work with, or what the solar flux is, or the realities of working in the space environment. But some of us do know all that stuff, collectively. I don't know everything, either, and I work in the field. Generally you need teams of specialists in different subjects to complete a project. So you won't get a complete answer in a forum comment. You get it in a study report that lots of people contributed to.