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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."
Raw materials.
You've just increased their costs hundred-fold, even if manufacturing were "free", power were "free" and delivery back to Earth comes free courtesy of gravity.
It's costs millions to put a few hundred kilos into orbit. Let alone getting it somewhere useful. And capturing, refining and using material already in space is basically 100% unproven at the moment - we've literally never done it and have no idea of the associated costs.
His ignorance of how solar works is pretty apparent from what he's saying. The flux of photons in space is about 1/3 more than than on earth (1366W/sq. meter in space vs 1000W/sq. meter on earth). Woopee. So you'd be willing to build factories and solar farms IN SPACE to get slightly more power? Nevermind that it will be thousands of times more expensive to put them in space; the radiation in space quickly renders all but the most expensive solar options non-functional in less than a year. This is a very stupid idea.
Economics: Population growth is tied to scarcity. New technology reduces scarcity--when you scale up, you eventually stop adding 10% more human labor time (wages!) for 10% more e.g. food, and start adding 20% for 10% growth, and stuff gets expensive, and we lose the capacity to produce everything to scale with population--and that means population can grow without experiencing downward pressure. Freezing population growth would play all kinds of hell on the monetary system, and isn't a viable option for *many* reasons; it's also an economic behavior tied to technology.
Energy argument: Solar energy in space still would require massive collectors; the cost and scale of labor to put them up there, assemble them, maintain them, and operate them would be huge, incurring immense costs. It's really easy to pipe billions of barrels of oil into a building and burn them; it's really hard to collect that much sunlight. This argument holds true mostly for large-scale, high-consumption factories: a steel mill in space won't have any notable output capacity unless it's stationed on a dyson sphere with power cables run to it.
This guy doesn't realize he's talking about hundreds of megawatts here, entire power stations for single factories.
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I can't begin to understand why someone would seriously suggest something so ridiculous. After we have a fully working space tether, sure. Before that, absolutely not.
-SR
In the 1960s rockets landing on their tail and being reused was science fiction, unproven, and its associated costs unknown. 50 years later its doable and its costs known and its the less expensive tech.
... We already know how to mine the water and do quite useful stuff with it (drinking, breathing O2, H2+O2 for fuel, ...). Other simple and available organic compounds also have quite well known processes and uses.
Bezos specified he's talking about a hundred or more years in the future. In fifty years we went from aircraft that were little more than wooden/canvas structures with engines to landing on the moon. We are already landing on asteroids, already doing long range commercial analysis,
The missing pieces are largely matters of engineering not scientific understanding, and the engineering often not far removed from today's capabilities. And the economics of it all is largely a matter of scale. Apollo 11 bringing back a bag of rocks is like building Intel's i7 CPU fab and only building 100 CPUs. Those CPUs are awfully damn expensive. Now start doing things at scale and quantity as Bezos is talking about. And also as Bezos discusses, be sure to factor in the external costs of that earth bound manufacturing, particular health and environmental costs when your make comparisons, not simply the cost of the goods sold.
Actually population growth freezes itself when you educate people. Look at Japan. Low immigration and low birthrate has lead to population decline.
that would never have been if their creators had listened to all of the armchair inventors on /.
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.
Yup.
Step 1: get launch costs down to 1/4 or so of what they are today. Ongoing, with multiple competitors. SpaceX aims for 10%.
Step 2: drag a CHON asteroid into orbit, and make a fuel station through automated mining. We could start that project today, given the rapid advancement in automation. That brings down the cost of everything above LEO to something practical.
Step 3: drag an aluminum asteroid into orbit. Heavy industry begins. Large reflectors make the power needs trivial (melting aluminum is easy in a solar furnace, when you start with 1300 kW/m^2 free). Aluminum foam panels let you build large structures in orbit with no heavy lifting.
The rest is just toolchain - one step at a time figuring out how to make the next link nearly free in orbit. Not in my lifetime, sure, but in a few hundred years? Fairly straightforward.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
We do have a habit of ruining the Earth's ecosystem in order to get access to raw minerals, so in this regard, Mr. Bezos is correct. However, it should be noted that we are already destroying the ecosystem with our chemical fuel power sources and discarded products. If we really want to save the Earth, we should 1) focus on moving away from chemical power sources to electromagnetic power sources and 2) reprocessing and recycling 100% of things that have been discarded (including sewage).
If we manage these two things, the Earth will have been mostly saved and we can shift more focus toward geoengineering and external mineral sources. That is how the Earth could be saved.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Exactly. Population growth is not exponential, and never has been. Instead, it's logistic with a limit at the carrying capacity. It only appeared exponential because we're only now starting to hit the inflection point, and because the carrying capacity itself has been increasing due to technology.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
My first reaction was that this was ridiculous, but on second thought the concept itself is not actually all that wrong. It simply relies on a very specific barrier that has not been overcome yet: Gravity. Industrial endeavors of any kind are all very heavy, and current launch methods are all horribly inefficient (the best currently is the Ariane 5 at a little under 39% payload/vehicle weight, but it's still more or less a one-use/disposable vehicle). So for industry of any scale the cost of actually getting the necessary equipment far outweighs, massively outweighs, dare I say it, even ASTRONOMICALLY outweighs any savings you'd have from doing the work in space with a Zero-G environment and 24-hour solar power available (both very real but not immense savings). There is a reason that the International Space Station is the single most expensive object ever created by mankind (at $157 billion it comes in at more than 6 times the cost of the #2 object, the Itaipu Dam).
That being said, if we can manage to get a cheap method of reacting orbit, the primary barrier would be circumvented and it would make all kinds of sense to migrate such things to orbit. As the OP suggested, energy is abundant (both from solar sources and from various theoretical designs of orbital tethers tapping electrostatic energy in the atmosphere or electrodynamic magnetic harvesting. At that point the Zero-G environment would make large scale industrial and manufacturing endeavors much easier, especially if you can accept the idea that by that time the bulk of the raw materials would be harvested from non-terrestrial sources like asteroids, comets, and meteoroids.
Currently the most promising concept on tap seems to be the Orbital Space Elevator. We have basically all the fundamental technologies required with the advent of Carbon Nanotubes (as opposed to more theoretical solutions involving gravity manipulation, for example). It has come down largely to a manufacturing challenge of creating the 22 mile cable required, when currently nothing longer than about one meter has been achieved.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
Anything organic? Pretty much no (trace amounts at best).
Therefore petroleum, oils, etc. are out of the question.
Entire asteroids made of CHON, some quite nearby. Given the atoms and power, you can make the chains as long as you like. And solar power is quite something in space.
Aluminum is a very useful metal for building stuff out of in space. Again, entire asteroids of the stuff are available, some nearby. The energy to refine the Al is almost free, since a solar furnace works nicely (eventually you have arbitrarily-sized polished aluminum reflectors to work with).
Silicon chips are the longest toolchain known to man, plus just about the highest value-to-mass ratio - no reason to ever do that in orbit. But heavy industry? Makes perfect sense.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The problem is that's is very difficult to freeze population to a constant level (see China). You might be able to freeze the head count but run the risk of severly skewing your age pyramid, which can lead to massive problems a generation later. Moreover, birth control isn't popular in the free world, you'd be limiting an essential human freedom (and the purpose of life).
The danger is declining population.
You don't actually want declining population:
1) Most pension schemes rely on at least constant population. Smarter pension schemes rely on economic growth (which is possible with slightly declining population), but not all countries have them implemented.
2) Declining population can also trigger massive problems with economy: You'll have to divest in a controlled and smart way. Example: real estate values are likely to drop if head count goes down. See former East German towns: some of them have become almost ghost towns, many with only retirees living there. This triggers business closings, which in turn makes young people move away. A self enforcing negative trend.
More population is no problem. There's lots of space on earth. If it becomes too crowded people will move to Mars or space. In fact, that could become a driving force, eventually.
ep, that's the problem. Plus everything has to be hermetically sealed, radiation hard, protected from micro satellites, etc etc. Doing things on Earth is much easier and cheaper than doing things in space.
None of that applies if what you need is thermal power - which is most of heavy industry (something like 1/4 of the US's total power consumption is direct thermal use of burning fuels in heavy industry). Refining aluminum or iron from asteroids made of the stuff? A polished Al reflector 100m square gives you 10MW, 1 km on a side and you've got 1 GW, and you've got basically unlimited Al to work with.
Doing things on Earth is much easier and cheaper than doing things in space.
Today, yes. But we're not talking about today. Think about what you can do with effectively free fuel in high orbit. Lots of heavy industry makes sense in orbit, once the fuel cost to de-orbit the result isn't a concern.
Plus, what about stuff we want to use in space. Colonizing other planets becomes practical if you get multi-kiloton structures for nearly free in orbit, plus the fuel to move them around nearly free, plus the fuel to move a million tons of ice to the surface of Mars, etc.
The only things we should need to lift off the surface are people and computer chips (and similar lightweight, long toolchain stuff, but chips are the big one).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
2) Declining population can also trigger massive problems with economy: You'll have to divest in a controlled and smart way. Example: real estate values are likely to drop if head count goes down. See former East German towns: some of them have become almost ghost towns, many with only retirees living there. This triggers business closings, which in turn makes young people move away. A self enforcing negative trend.
It's not just Germany; the USA is filled with small towns like this, all over the place. The population here is urbanizing, so all the young people are moving to cities. The big cities are growing bigger, as are the medium-sized ones. The towns are all shrinking and dying, and are full of people who never left and are now retired.
You wouldn't push asteroids into LEO, no. High orbit or one of the Lagrange points. (Home home on Lagrange, where the robots and asteroids roam).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You may be interested in my space elevator class notes and slides:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/...
https://imgur.com/a/cCTY5
The main factors limiting population growth have little to do with carrying capacity. The biggest ones are education, access to birth control, and eliminating poverty. Wealthy, well educated countries tend to have the lowest birth rates, even though (being wealthy) they're the ones most capable of supporting a larger population.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
> 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.
> and usually costs more energy than that thing could harvest in space).
That's incorrect. The Falcon 9 rocket has a liftoff mass of 550,000. Their website says it is 96% rocket, and 4% payload. So 24 units of rocket per unit of payload. The combustion energy of the fuel is 13 MJ/kg, and the embodied energy of the rocket hardware is in the same range. So about 312 MJ/kg is required to get the payload into orbit. 1 kg of modern space solar panels produce 175 Watts, and they last >15 years in low orbit. Duty cycle is 60% in low orbit due to the Earth's shadow. So they produce 31,556,925 seconds/year x 15 years x 60% x 175 Watts/kg = 49.7 GJ/kg. That's 160 times their launch energy. That's why satellites almost universally use solar panels instead of fuel cells or some other power source.