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Where Does Jeff Bezos Foresee Putting Space Colonists? Inside O'Neill Cylinders (geekwire.com)
Elon Musk of SpaceX wants to settle humans on Mars. Some talk about taking the Moon Village route. But Jeff Bezos has a different kind of off-Earth home in mind when he talks about having millions of people living and working in space. His long-range vision focuses on a decades-old concept for huge artificial habitats that are best known today as O'Neill cylinders. From a report on GeekWire (edited and condensed): The concept was laid out in 1976 in a classic book by physicist Gerard O'Neill, titled "The High Frontier." The idea is to create cylinder-shaped structures in outer space, and give them enough of a spin that residents on the inner surface of the cylinder could live their lives in Earth-style gravity. The habitat's interior would be illuminated either by reflected sunlight or sunlike artificial light. Bezos referred to his long-term goal of having millions of people living and working in space, as well as his enabling goal of creating the 'heavy lifting infrastructure' to make that happen. In Bezos' view, dramatically reducing the cost of access to space is a key step toward those goals. "Then we get to see Gerard O'Neill's ideas start to come to life, and many of the other ideas from science fiction," Bezos said. "The dreamers come first. It's always the science-fiction guys: They think of everything first, and then the builders come along and they make it happen. But it takes time." For Musk, the prime driver behind settling people on Mars is to provide a backup plan for humanity in the event of a planetwide catastrophe -- an asteroid strike, for example, or environmental ruin, or a species-killing pandemic. Bezos sees a different imperative at work: humanity's growing need for energy. "We need to go into space if we want to continue growing civilization," he explained. "If you take baseline energy usage on Earth and compound it at just 3 percent per year for less than 500 years, you have to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar cells. That's just not going to happen. [...] I predict that in the next few hundred years, all heavy industry will move off planet. It will be just way more convenient to do it in space, where you have better access to resources, better access to 24/7 solar power," he said last weekend. "Solar power on Earth is not that great, because the planet shades us half the time. In space, you get solar power all the time. So there'll be a lot of advantages to doing heavy manufacturing there, and Earth will end up zoned residential and light industry. [...] We want to go to space to save the Earth. I don't like the 'Plan B' idea that we want to go to space so we have a backup planet. ... We have sent probes to every planet in this solar system, and believe me, this is the best planet. There is no doubt. This is the one that you want to protect."
He needs an industrial-sized shipment of anti-psychotics delivered by drone, STAT.
We have lost a hero to our glorious and noble cause, but does this foreshadow our defeat? No. It is a new beginning. Compared to Earth Federation the military resources of Zeon is less than one thirtieth of theirs. Despite this major difference, how is it that we have been able to fight the fight for so long? It is because our goal in this war is a righteous one. It’s been over fifty years since the elite of the Federation, consumed by greed began a war against our blessed empire! Never forget the times when the Federation has trampled us! We, the blessed children of God almighty, have had a long and arduous struggle to achieve glory for our great nation. Our fight is sacred, our cause divine. The war is at a stalemate. Perhaps many of you have become complacent.
The Federation has polluted our most cherished systems for merely the sake of their own greed! We must send them a message, but not composed of words. We have wasted too much time with words. We need action now. The Earth elite must be taught a strong lesson for their evil corruption. This is only the beginning of our war. We have been putting more and more money into our efforts towards making our military stronger than ever. The Federation has done the same.
Many of your fathers and brothers have perished valiantly in the face of a contemptible enemy. We must never forget what the Federation has done to our people! These Brave men have shown us these virtues through their own valiant sacrifice. By focusing our anger and sorrow, we are finally in a position where victory is within our grasp, and once again, our most cherished nation will flourish. Victory is the greatest tribute we can pay those who sacrifice their lives for us! Rise, our people, Rise! Take your sorrow, and turn it into anger! Zeon thirsts for the strength of its people! SIEG ZEON!
Babylon Five! </voice>
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Actually, the idea of a so-called "O'Niell Cylinder" was put forward in 1973 by Arthur C. Clarke in a book titled Rendezvous with Rama.
There were some engineering failures in those designs.
It was usually assumed that the contained atmosphere would become thinner approaching the axis - and that doesn't happen. On a sphere, the rising air currents are formed due to the density difference between upper and lower air. Unfortunately with a rotating cylinder anything NOT in contact with the rim doesn't rotate - hence no force to rise.. Yes, there is a boundary layer right at the rim - but once above that, nope. The simulated force decreases the closer to the axis of rotation you get... thus "clouds" would not form. To get a cloud, the rising air column has to expand... but in a cylinder there is no place to expand to.
The other problem was that they used 1/3 of the cylinder to reflect lighting through - also doesn't work, as it makes the core axis too hot.
What would happen (without the heat) is that the core around the axis would become a single cloud, and little to no air circulation.
Same thing happens if you spin a raw egg. It doesn't spin because the liquid center can't - the turbulance at the axis stops it, and that propagates out to the rim.
The only I could see for reasonable air circulation was to put a core in the cylinder that then can be used to force rain/cooling actions.
Or, more accurately, the cylinder vessel from Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, which predates The High Frontier by 3 years.
As Kim Stanley Robinson proposed in his recent novel Aurora , the longterm survival of human biology might be inextricably dependent on Earth's ecosystem. Not just the sort of Earth-like features one can reproduce in an artificial habit for a few years, but the planet-wide scale that Earth offers. (In the novel, people on a generation starship discover that salt and other toxins start building up quickly in the smaller scale of their ship.) If humanity is going to survive, that looks like it can happen only if we transcend biology, and if the human race does start moving into machine bodies, then it might not be necessary to leave Earth after all — Vernor Vinge once mused that the reason we don't see other civilizations is because they moved themselves deep under planets' surface where even asteroid strikes wouldn't matter, and they now pass their time in virtual realities where life is easy and limitless instead of the hard work of interplanetary exploration.
So that's why Amazon's stock went down. Investors heard Bezos talk...
I know everyone wants to colonize space. Because in 500 years our planet will be covered in solar cells (no nuclear? did solar get better in 500 years?). But seriously? Space? Our two best choices are A) the close ("close") place with no atmosphere or B) the far place with a crappy atmosphere. Wouldn't even a Kevin Costner Waterworld style scenario be better than escaping our gravity well only to end up where success is unlikely and sustained success is fragile? A cruise ships costs less than an average shuttle launch!
When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp.
So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp.
So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp.
But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The only resources within an O'Neill Cylinders are the ones that man puts there. They need to have a 100% recycling ability within the cylinder or they will need a place to dump waste and take in new resources.
Not saying that this is a deal-breaker, but it means everything needs to be more finely balanced. It's like keeping a fishtank. A small aquarium can quickly go belly-up if the chemistry isn't maintained. Large Aquariums are more stable. A pond or a lake, infinitely moreso.
Mars is an ocean. An O'Neill Cylinder is a fishbowl.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
And send him off!
He is correct. We will need more energy, and clearly there are only two ways to get it: colonize space, or cover the entire Earth with solar cells. There are no other alternatives. Clearly.
I can't say I disagree with Bezos on any one argument, but he's skipping a bit far in the timeline. "O'Neill" cylinders will require extensive in space resource utilization (heavy construction, materials collection/processing, etc). It will be a century or more AFTER we have cultivated colonies on the Moon, Mars, etc before we have the resources to build them.
And that is -the- reason to build an O'Neill colony.
In order to build it and make it work, it is necessary to understand an ecology, deeply and comprehensively. Mistakes will be made and what better place to make a mistake than a totally artificial habitat? The first of the experiments (actual experiments, not "I read the journals" studies) was BioSphere, and that didn't work out so well.
So what was the motivation to fix BioSphere? Not much, really. Easier to walk away muttering "That was bad, dude."
With a colony, the colonials are most mighty motivated to fix the darn thing. If technology needs to be developed, it will be developed. If new principles need to be learned, they will be learned.
And for all of you "This is a nutty idea" I have a few short words. New World. Panama Canal. Washing Hands.
Nutty ideas have a way to become decidedly un-nutty.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
Bezos has jumped the shark from trying to control the entire world of retail sales to trying to control the world, period.
Bezos uses the Washington Post to advance his personal political agenda. That means the Post is no longer an outlet
for news, but is instead an outlet for PROPAGANDA. Compare the Post's headlines with those found in Reuters, or the NYT,
and you will be forced to conclude that Bezos is operating the Post with an agenda that puts the truth far down the list of
priorities.
Why not call it Freeside and have it run by an AI. While at it, Amazon could join forces with Tesla, and call the joint venture T-A...
People keep posting, ad nauseam, about how we need a basic income because there will soon be no more jobs on Earth. Does anyone know what these new space jobs will be?
captcha: fooled
Bozos can charge you for air and light too
With all of these rotating habitat theories, one thing that I'm not sure about is what happens if you jump and leave the surface? Wouldn't the surface keep moving below you, while you wouldn't move forward with the surface. Or would you keep moving up until you hit the other side of the habitat as there would be no gravity to pull you back down? Or would you float like you are back in zero-g?
If you were in the middle of this tube in outer space you would be floating like they do on the space station I would think.
Firstly he can pay them less because they can hardly walk out, can they?
And why bother routing your profits through Ireland, St. Bongo & Lower Melilla when you can stuff them on Ganymede?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
STFU. If the future were up to people like you the world would remain a very stagnant and very boring place. Even if it doesn't work out, better to let people dream and try.
O'Neill Cylinders are unstable as I recall. They tend to eventually start rotating around their short axis instead, dumping everything on the curved walls out to the end caps.
Stanford Toruses are better.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
"Humans aren't meant to travel on the sea, if we were we would have evolved fins" - Except we invented ships in all shapes and sizes and now literally tens of thousands of ships and tens of millions of people travel the oceans of the world.
"Humans were never meant to fly, otherwise we'd have wings" - Over a hundred years of airtravel including some transits which lasted weeks or months, along with the close to 900 Million people who travel per year pretty much blows this out of the water.
There are droves of examples where humans can't naturally exist, but do so normally today (Mountain climbing, deep sea exploration, Arctic Exploration, etc). How different history would be if instead of exploring, pushing the limits and discovering new things our ancestors simply stayed in Africa and busied themselves with new ways to stack mud for their huts and thatch their roofs.
How about trying to fix Earth? Nah, too hard and not enough glory. Space nutters are narcissists.
For Mobile Suit Gundam reference.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
You'd need to invent some special technology to radiate all that waste heat back out into space or your 'free energy from the sun' engines would bake you to death.
The problem with using space-based industry to send power to Earth has a very simple problem: heat. If we replaced all the of energy industries with space based solar cells we'd no longer locally generate power. But our devices would still inefficiently convert that power to work with waste heat. This makes the energy budget for the Earth even more fun to calculate.
Today "insolation adds 1366 W/m2 to the Earth. A lot of that trapped by the Atmosphere, rocks, water in the oceans and a non-trivial part in plants. Putting more solar cells on the surface of the Earth doesn't really change the heat budget. Trapping more of the light with greenhouse gases does, pushing the balance up a bit. Blocking out Sunlight with soot pushes it down a bit.
Focusing more light on the Earth does change the budget and quickly. Just to meet today's needs we would have to provide between 525 and 600 quadrillion Btu (source). Right now we do that with the sunlight energy either already stored up here or current sunlight falling onto the planet from space. (And some geothermal left over from radioactive material and the heat trapped from smashing a bunch of stuff together to make the planet.)
Right now, since we are supposed to be in an Ice age, this might be an advantage. Without the constant pumping of greenhouse gases to keep the temperature up this in-fall of more energy and waste heat could be used to keep the surface comfortable.
But what happens when we go past that point? Nobody wants to turn off their TV, air conditioning or cellphones for a few days to keep the heat budget in check. Just like today nobody wants to stop using the cheapest oil, coal or plasticizer no matter the cancer, coughing or smog filled skies.
The problem with these is that as soon as something leaves the surface, it has no artificial gravity. Kick up a little bit of dirt? It's stuck in the air until it randomly collides with something. Splash water? Throw a ball? Break something? The pieces will retain their initial trajectory until they collide with something. This could easily be a human on the opposite end of the diameter, riding through a cloud of debris.
You space nutters need to stop "dreaming" and start joining us here on Earth. The fact is YOU AREN'T GOING ANYWHERE. We evolved to live on Earth. We cannot live anywhere else for long periods of time. This is simple biology.
While I understand where you are coming from, absolute statements that open with "The fact is" always remind me of the following quote.
'If I am the wisest man, it is because I alone know that I know nothing. The implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal." -- Socrates
The fact is the facts keep changing. What is true about our compatibility with space exploration and colonization as a species today may not be true tomorrow. You may consider "space nutters" a little silly, but one of the greatest motivators for me (as a happily dreaming nutter), is the knowledge that, considering the vastness of space, we just don't know what we don't know.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
on the first Gundam frame. Zeon forever, freedom for the colonies!!!!
Why not do both?
I understand the allure of separating heavy industry from people and parks and nice things, to centralize the pollution. But if you put heavy industry in space and most people still live on the ground, it takes an incredible amount of energy to get the raw resources into orbit and bring the finish products back down. If you mine the moon or asteroids, that still takes a lot of energy to get to space-based factories. If you put the factories on the moon or near the asteroids, that's still a lot of energy to ship finished products back to earth or orbital habitats. If you put the factories on Earth near the resources, it's a lot of energy to get the finished products up to orbit.
Besides, factories pollute a lot less now than they used, they are getting cleaner all the time, and we rely on heavy industry, percentage-wise, a lot less than we used to, and all these trends are going to continue.
And if energy becomes so cheap (fusion, cold fusion, who knows) that all this shuffling is practical, then it would also be practical to simply pour all that energy into making heavy industry even cleaner. The problem with cutting pollution isn't the idea, it's doing so efficiently, and with cheap energy, efficiency becomes more relative.
So what am I missing? What is the actual benefit to separating heavy industry and people?
Infuriate left and right
SIEG ZEON!
Indeed, That IS your opinion!
Irony:
$CAPTCHA=="pathetic"
We evolved to live on Earth. We cannot live anywhere else for long periods of time. This is simple biology. The only place we can live is on Earth, or another Earth like planet. And we know, based on physics, that we cannot reach another Earth like planet.
Isn't the whole point of something like this to build something that basically mimics completely the conditions of Earth? You are right of course, we are evolved to live on Earth. So, if we want to go somewhere where there isn't Earth, we will have to bring it with us.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Do you say something along these lines to anyone who stands for a cause? Have you tried this approach with, for example, religious people?
I bet that, If you would have lived 6 million years ago, you would have been the one to tell Lucy to stop dreaming about leaving the trees because early hominids evolved to live in trees and she cannot live anywhere else.
And you would probably also have told early homo sapiens to stay in Africa because homo sapiens did not evolve to survive in the cold Northern European climate.
1. It's not like there can only be ONE reason to leave the surface of the Earth. Bezos says he is not motivated by the "backup plan" idea because Earth is the best place and we should protect it. I didn't hear Musk say we should not protect Earth or that Earth was not the best, so this is a straw man argument by Bezos. And it's not just that we should go to Mars because of the "possibility" of a worldwide calamity like an asteroid. There is a 100% chance that a species ending asteroid will eventually hit Earth. It may be a long time or it may be quite soon... no way to predict. But we don't want to have all our eggs in this admittedly very nice basket when that happens.
2. My instinct is that mankind should not be living in large numbers in space. We are big bags of water who are too susceptible to radiation, temperature extremes, pressure drops, lack of oxygen, etc. etc. We are evolved to live on a planetary surface, so Mars it is.
3. The long term future of intelligence in space is going to be machine intelligence. Machines are better than we are at exploring the dangerous environments out there. So let's ensure the survival of humanity by going to Mars while at the same time seeking the energy benefits of space colonies (inhabited mainly by machines). These possibilities are mutually re-enforcing, not mutually exclusive.
The real question is do we want to grow our civilization and, if so, in quantity or in quality or both? Obviously if we breed beyond replacement levels we will eventually overpopulate any fixed finite space. It's not clear that optimizing for the maximal number of humans is the best outcome. I think we should instead be focusing on reducing human population to managable numbers while advancing social structures and technology to have better human lives rather than just more human lives. One could eliminate about 80% of the people on Earth and have little negative impact on the human race.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
I'd rather live in a space colony designed by Samantha Carter or Dr Rodney McKay
Has he solved the cosmic ray & solar flare problem?
Reminds me of this
Jeff Bezos read something someone else did and he wants to leverage it as his own? shocking.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on