You seem to have a dim bulb, so this is the last I'll say to you about this. Your position seems to be; "good or bad, they're doing this, and we all ought to just get used to it." And that's a narrative that I absolutely reject.
I'm pretty sure I never said anything about changing reality. However, falling in with a contrived narrative leads to a narrowing of thoughts and forgetting other options exist. If we pragmatically live in the dystopia forced upon us, then we remain in it. If we keep our sights on a better world, then we stay in control of our own destinies. So sad that you feel my lack of submission is childish. For me, a man does not submit to his bonds.
I'll never understand why some people don't see the difference between law enforcement being able to surveil a suspect, and law enforcement tracking every citizen closely all the time.
Vigalent cameras (and one major competitor plus a host of smaller members of the scanned license plate database industry) are placed in fixed locations as well as attached to damn near every tow truck in the country. This is why tow trucks keep taking quick jaunts through parking lots, going too fast for a human to read plates and check lists. The cameras are reading every plate. It's a bonus reason for them to stage their trucks along congested expressways. These companies compile and keep the data for decades.
This fool thinks that it's horrible that a detailed database of every license plate that Vigalent cameras ever saw, and the place and time it was seen, is now in the hands of law enforcement and probably soon in available for a small fee. Spouse abusers, kidnappers and hitmen take note. NSA/FBI, whoever can't collect this legally themselves, can now fetch a outline of anyone's life and create a profit for the private industry supplier.
Diesel trains ARE ELECTRIC. The fuel runs engines which turn generators to power the electric motors. They're the original "hybrid" vehicle. "The more you know TM"
You have links to the code committed by the NSA to Linux kernel? No? Your just blathering about the phobias and fears that only exist between your ears? Yes, we thought so
Hey Chuckles. You don't know for a FACT that burglars have their sights set on your property. So show us some confidence and leave your doors unlocked and your keys on the dashboard.
Trust me, the agency responsible for this leak will NOT be penalized enough to be more careful in the future. This is effectively immunization, and that's better for business than any insurance policy. They calculate the losses (in lost profit + lawsuits, etc.) vs the expense of better safety, and whichever is cheapest wins. Who cares if 1600 customers are roasted in their own juices, when the expense of greater safety is larger than the profits those customers would have provided?:D
Neither the CO2, nor the natural gas in question, is just rising due to buoyancy. The weight of the thousands of feet of rock holds the gas under pressure. It's like a whoopie cushion with a stack of 99 cinder blocks on top of it. It's actually physically impossible to store gas underground at surface-level densities. It takes a lot of pressure to force it down there, but the advantage is that you don't need power to extract this gas; just a pressure regulator. The earth is full of cracks and holes, most of which are pressed tightly together, making an airtight seal. Evidently the earth around this exhausted oil well isn't sealed tightly enough, at least not any more. In the case of this natural gas, like the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, the regulators and valves have been circumvented. Any gas (or liquid) sequestered in this manner will shoot up like a rocket for months or years. CO2 will fill up nearby valleys and flow along low-lying paths. Until the reserve runs out, it would create a zone lethal to animals.
Something said in another article about this leak, was that they *don't* try to burn them off, because it complicates the repair. I get the impression that the facility this leak is at is still open for business. The heat from the fire would force workers to keep a greater distance, and destroy equipment which the gas plume alone doesn't harm. It also seems that the leak is not coming out of a broken pipe, but rather from where it emerges, or even cracks in the ground nearby it. A fire fed like this might move around, pop up in unexpected places, and perhaps disintegrate the ground underneath the facility. Burnt, it's better for the environment, but set alight, it might never be put out.
You misunderstand. This is not a production well, it is a storage well. This is natural gas which has already been pumped topside, treated with scent, and has been forced back underground into an expired oil well. It's a super-cheap way to store fuel, but in the minds of those who are not legally immunized from disasters like this one, extremely risky. When storage wells like this crack open, there's almost nothing that can be done, and no ability to do anything quickly in any case.
I agree. It would be better to disguise your data as normal traffic!
Bittorrent might be an ideal choice, since we've seen evidence that the sp00ks discard that traffic wholesale. You'd set up a legit bittorrent repository with a few thousand popular files, on a server which publicly appears to enforce a strict up/download ratio, which would help explain why so many clients stayed connected for long times downloading small chunks. Your own client would essentially join a cloud of encrypted proxies and contribute relay services.
Other good choices would be disguising traffic as https browsing blogs, forums and decentralized social networks. Your obfuscation server would be like a plugin to these kinds of legitimate public servers. It would look just like people were just catching up on news and posts. The higher the traffic the site has, the better. Occasionally, we might see major websites get hacked to include the obfuscation feature for a few days here and there. Sp00ks will have to log all https traffic to and from cnn, yahoo, google, microsoft, lolz!
Since sp00ks count bytes to determine what page you're looking at, even when using https, the obfuscation server could pad the packets to simulate a walk through various actual threads or web pages it hosts.
Here here! Gnome over VNC is so clumsy and fragile. You'd think they hadn't bothered to try it out after writhing that POS called Vino. To get into some of my newer Linux boxen from windoze, I have to VNC to an older Linux and VNC on again due to Vino not supporting the encryption available in windoze VNC clients. And the work-arounds simply don't work for me. Would consider an alternate client if it weren't $$.
Everything I read about the search for alien life, and the search for new places for Humanity to live seems to follow an unquestioned narrative about how do we find a Sunlike star? How do we find an Earthlike planet? When are we going to colonize Mars and Venus? Wheeee!
The only natural place Mankind can live properly is on Earth. Other places can be made survivable, if you're willing to live under domes or in tunnels like frail, albino morlocks. But gravity is one thing we can never make right. And it's a vital issue. Let's set aside the Earthlike gravity in the acid clouds of Venus or the cloud-tops of Saturn. I mean, really.
It's with an ironic eye that I notice all of the technology being talked about, to build habitats on the Moon and Mars are even more suited for building in orbit. And without the great risk and expense of dropping it, along with it's population, onto a planet's surface intact. After you've dropped all these things down on Mars, you have to exploit Mars for the tremendous resources to launch anything back up again. And for what? Are we selling Martian cookware to Earthlings at $10,000,000.00/ea? Anything we toss down a gravity well is basically staying there. It's lost. And it cost a lot.
So, let's simply stay in orbit and use 3D printing technology to build rotating colonies out of crushed, sintered rock. You can't just spin a natural body; it's going to be too fragile, too flawed. But we're going to be mining these things, pulverizing them for minerals and chemicals. We can just build home out of the tailings. And the insides of these colonies will be tailored perfectly for us - no compromises, no need for genetic experimentation. Probably all built by robots, or at least by telepresence, after the first couple of generations.
We don't need a certain kind of planet, and we don't even need a certain kind of star. All we need is a power source that we can adapt our machines to, and raw material floating free to assemble into these rocky tubes.
We'll start by establishing a robotic factory on the Moon to toss up refined aluminum, iron and packages of powdered rock. We'll use that to build...thousands of colonies in Earth-Moon vicinity. Later, we'll take on Mars' moons. After that, we have the asteroids. That should keep us busy for a million years.
I'm not saying we won't, or shouldn't visit the planets, but they simply won't be worth more than scientific outposts, or tourist resorts, even after we someday have cheap, safe means to land on and launch off of planets (probably orbital skyhooks).
Well, planets which are practically identical to Earth would have advantages... provided you intended to abandon space for ground living again. Remember, my point is that once you're in orbit, everything you need is in easy reach. Why go back to ground again? If a planet isn't Earth, then it won't be much like Earth anyway.
I'm at a loss to understand why you're so fixated with living on planets. That you would consider almost any planet or moon over a colony. Colonies will be easier to build with existing material in orbit, and promise ideal living conditions, while planets and moons will be expensive and dangerous to get on and off of, and provide unnatural living conditions.
Swiss Cheese Planets:
Tunneling Luna, other moons or planets is still pointless. You don't take into account that due to structural needs, you'll have to leave a lot of solid rock untouched, and you'll still only be able to go down a few miles, wasting most of the interior. And the excavated material needs to be taken into account, as it must be dumped atop the ground outside, creating more pressure. A manufactured colony shell will be much thinner, stronger and bear very little weight other than it's own. If you were a giant, and could hold it, it would feel like a kite. It'll still be plenty thick to stop any ionizing radiation, perhaps even a nearby supernova extinction event that sterilizes Earth.
Tunnels and chambers in a world other than Earth (or Venus) would have the wrong gravity for modern humans. They'd be no place to live. Because we know that microgravity causes the human body to malfunction, it is not valid to assume (or hope, really) that merely "low" gravity will be just dandy. It may also turn out that centripetal pseudogravity doesn't fool the body into behaving either, but then that means we'll never live in space at all. I think that 1-G pseudogravity is more likely to work than various low gravity environments. Those "tidal forces" are believed to be imperceptible on a colony of a few hundred meters diameter. We can build that. Tensile strength is a non-issue. Ordinary asteroid rock is thought strong enough, but these colonies will be built out of an almost ceramic concrete sintered in place with solar light like a gigantic 3D printer. The walls will be cellular or corrugated for even more strength and utility. Your "honeycombed" moon idea will be full of natural flaws and material variations. It'll collapse under it's own weight unless you're a very conservative architect.
Impacts:
The shell of the colonies will be built in layers with embedded tunnels and chambers. Places to run pipes and subways, install machinery and hydroponics, rooms to store raw materials. High-energy impacts might pierce the outermost layer, but then an interesting thing happens. The debris showers across the next level with far less impact, likely being contained. This does not happen with a thick single layer. I don't know just how common impacts are in near-Earth space right now; they'll likely be worse after we've been tossing bags of crushed rock into low-lunar orbit to use in the solar forges, but it appears that the satellites we've launched are only encountering micrometeorites chipping and scratching at them. Oh, and that damn Chinese debris. Our mining debris will likely be fairly low-energy because our orbital stations and activities will all be done at relatively similar speeds. Destructive impacts could be a once-in-a-lifetime event. So we can design to survive that.
Illumination:
Because of these micrometeorites, as well as the bigger rocks, I don't like the idea of our colonies featuring gigantic windows to let in sunlight. I love the idea of living inside an O'Neil Cylinder, but those mammoth windows and mirrors make me cringe. Someone who understands optics would probably like to tweak my solution: I would go for a significantly smaller single solar window at the tip-end of the colony (assuming a cylindrical shape) and which is inset within a wall or length of
First of all, I'm not considering your idea of moving stars and planets. It's a far higher level of technology, which does not need to be attached to the concept of building colonies.
You seem to completely miss the point of building orbital colonies. The object is to provide quality living space for modern humans living off-world. They're not built for portability or convenient access to Earth. Virtually every orbital colony will be non-mobile. They'll be custom built for the orbit they're constructed in, essentially exchanging places with the asteroid they were built from. The colony's outer shells will be a dozen meters thick. The colonists will live on the INSIDE where the radiation ISN'T at. Their interiors will be climate controlled for modern humans and posthumans. Heat will generally not be a problem. Actually, getting rid of excess heat could be. But that's a separate issue.
It would actually be orders of magnitude more difficult to engineer the tunneling of a planet than it would be to just crack it apart and build orbital colonies out of the rubble. Demolition also makes far more building material available. But that would come gigayears later, when the manageable rocks and moons had been used up. Demolishing planets is also a level of technology unnecessary to filling the solar system with a million orbital colonies. There's only one planet we could "honeycomb" (well, two if you disregard the super-high temperature and high-pressure acid of Venus - nope), and that is Earth. Living under Earth is not living in space. All of the other planets have gravity that is too low or too high for healthy human life. Living forever inside tunnels within the planets and moons is for mutant albino morlocks. Folks have GOT to give up their fetish for colonizing planets! Essentially, we neither can, nor need to honeycomb any planets.
Addressing your misunderstanding about dwarf stars: Most of the stars in the universe are, or will be, super-long-lived dwarf stars. Obviously, no-one's going to colonize an unstable system, but dwarf stars, brown and red, are actually the most stable. Excluding white dwarfs in close proximity to another star or black hole. And those are very rare.
Organics are simply what our form of life is made of; it doesn't imply it was made BY something living. It's just a class of molecules. The universe is filled with organic matter which is not living.
Our first space mining outpost will be on the moon, and the first major colonies will be built around the moon and Earth in Lagrange orbits. These colonies will primarily be homes for the builders of orbital power stations and spacecraft. Virtually all of the material will come from the moon, launched by electric-powered mass drivers. The material they're built of will simply be a kind of ceramic concrete made from superheated lunar rock dust. The structural mass doubles as radiation shielding. Some colonies will be very large, with the ground area of a whole county inside. At this scale, folks will feel centripetal force almost like real gravity.
It will take a very long time til we run out of moon to build with, but our next step will be to mine the moons of Mars and build orbital colonies there. These colonies will more likely be independent, and not reliant on relationships with Earth. I thought Mercury would make a good next step, being so close to the free energy from the Sun, and only a little bigger than the moon, but it seems that it's gravity is almost as much as Mars. There might be surface operations there which beam power back to Earth and all around the whole system. The asteroids and other stray rocks come after that.
Other than our own big moon, since it's so close to us and it's all we've got for now, the other moons will be used starting with the smallest. The planets will be visited eventually, but not permanently inhabited, until we have some very cheap and safe way to get on and off. Planet-based habitats (surface, airborne, floating) on/at Mars, Venus and the moon will be concerned with science and business, or even leisure, but they simply will never make good places for modern humans to live. If we mutate into winnowy cave-dwelling morlocks, then those might be happy there.
Asteroid mining will involve surrounding a rock with a sort of bag, to keep all of the material from flying away and causing navigational hazards. These bags might be abandoned when the operation is finished. Colonists might seek these out for a rich source of pre-digested material. Some of the bags may intentionally be the right size and shape to line with sintered rock and simultaneously build a colony. It's interesting to think of the colonies and the objects they're built out of as cells or virus membranes. Humanity might be the DNA of a new breed of space virus.
I wasn't aware that we'd explored all of space, and that the hunt for alien life was over. I was actually under the impression that we've only been eyeballing nearby rocks and making skywizard-influenced conclusions about how things work and why! And we've only been doing this for less time than the length of the kind of journey we're talking about here.
But, get back to me in a thousand years when we've adopted, and abandoned, hundreds of totally new ways to communicate with each other and observe the heavens. Chances are, aliens aren't using 4G or VHF. It's possible that we just don't know how to detect a Dyson Swarm of colonies over these distances yet.
In closing, I never said there was a source of energy in interstellar space. However, we might find that there is. Otherwise, travelers would bring one with them, or have the power transmitted via tight beam from home. These are all well-known scenarios.
A civilization sufficiently advanced enough to move their whole star system would probably not be so attached to genuine planetside living that they'd go to all that trouble. They could simulate normal life perfectly inside orbital colonies. I can't think of any sort of being which would wish to travel personally to the stars, and yet could not leave home soil. Even a mountain-sized plant. or something like it, could live in a custom colony. And the kind of stars that would make a good gigarocket are not all that long-lived. That level of technology would easily be able to move colonies almost anywhere.
As for terraforming; The other planets would be more useful if broken up for raw materials to build orbital colonies. Long after the asteroids and other moons had been used up. The result would be millions of times the surface area of a mere planet, and it would all be built to perfectly comfortable climate. Colonizing Mars, Venus or moons is just a daft idea. Scientific and mining stations, sure. But the walloping majority of mankind will be in orbital colonies. This is infinitely easier than dealing with wrong gravity, pressure, temperatures and chemistry of planets other than Earth. If we ever start a terraforming program, we will not benefit from it. Aliens that rise and explore the galaxy long after we've died off might stumble upon some and use them. But why would we launch such a program?
It seems likely that mankind, and aliens who got started before us, will eventually establish permanent residences off of their home planets. In the not-so-distant future, the majority of mankind, by percentage, will live off-Earth. However, you should think of the planets as being the bottom of very deep holes, with most of them being too hot, cold, poisonous, exposed to radiation, or too much or too little pressure. The task of getting and leaving these places is risky and expensive, too. Let's just give up on the idea of colonizing Mars for the forseeable future, please! It may not always be so, but the solar system's orbital rocks are easier resources to get, and spitting up material from low-gravity objects with mass drivers. There's no point to terraforming a planet when that will take thousands of years, and no human civillization can keep a project like that, and it's cash flow, going for so long.
In short, we're just not gonna live like pale, stick-figure trolls in underground caverns on the moon or mars. Mining will be done by pulling a big bag over an asteroid and breaking it up from the outside in. Attached refining equipment will separate useful elements and chemicals. This will be mostly-automated. We'll use the tailings as concrete to build our colonies. A gigantic mirror will heat the crushed rock and sinter it into shape, like an enormous 3d printer. There is enough material to build millions of them in OUR OWN solar system, and they'll be essentially self-sustaining once they've been established. Conditions inside will be perfect for human life. It's a far better prospect than making do with low-gravity moons and poisonous planetary atmospheres. Groups of colonies might form "countries" and others will operate independently. The colonies will be built robotically, so the cost will eventually drop to the point where one might be owned by a single family or other social group.
While most colonies will participate in a humanity-wide economic and social network, a life of physical isolation and self-sufficiency will be the norm for most. We'll be in communication, but not often physically visiting other colonies. Some of these may try hurtling themselves onward to the next closest star. They'll stay in touch the whole time, they'll just be permanently out of reach from then on.
The stars DO NOT need to be sun-like, nor do they need Earth-like worlds! They just need to have exploitable resources in easy reach. Red and brown dwarfs are more plentiful than any other type, and they'll last orders of magnitude longer, too. This is probably where the majority of intelligent life will live at some point. Not to miss out on any exploitable resource, those who live around dwarf stars will push onward to practically every type of star within reach. A million years or so, and we'll have colonies throughout the galaxy, and hundreds of alien neighbors to enrich our culture and science.
Met Steve in person, of course. Nice guy, but quiet. And his brother Ken Jackson was the owner/boss/ mgt. of note.
IO had less than 5,000 customers, less than 20 staff, and brought in about a million in revenues per year. Here's a snapshot of the ISP's web v1.0 era website:
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to have a dim bulb, so this is the last I'll say to you about this. Your position seems to be; "good or bad, they're doing this, and we all ought to just get used to it." And that's a narrative that I absolutely reject.
I'm pretty sure I never said anything about changing reality. However, falling in with a contrived narrative leads to a narrowing of thoughts and forgetting other options exist. If we pragmatically live in the dystopia forced upon us, then we remain in it. If we keep our sights on a better world, then we stay in control of our own destinies. So sad that you feel my lack of submission is childish. For me, a man does not submit to his bonds.
Yes and your narrative feeds the beast.
I'll never understand why some people don't see the difference between law enforcement being able to surveil a suspect, and law enforcement tracking every citizen closely all the time.
TRON: Trace on.
TROFF: Turn that annoying extra trace ouput off.
Vigalent cameras (and one major competitor plus a host of smaller members of the scanned license plate database industry) are placed in fixed locations as well as attached to damn near every tow truck in the country. This is why tow trucks keep taking quick jaunts through parking lots, going too fast for a human to read plates and check lists. The cameras are reading every plate. It's a bonus reason for them to stage their trucks along congested expressways. These companies compile and keep the data for decades.
https://www.aclu.org/feature/y...
This fool thinks that it's horrible that a detailed database of every license plate that Vigalent cameras ever saw, and the place and time it was seen, is now in the hands of law enforcement and probably soon in available for a small fee. Spouse abusers, kidnappers and hitmen take note. NSA/FBI, whoever can't collect this legally themselves, can now fetch a outline of anyone's life and create a profit for the private industry supplier.
Diesel trains ARE ELECTRIC. The fuel runs engines which turn generators to power the electric motors. They're the original "hybrid" vehicle. "The more you know TM"
You have links to the code committed by the NSA to Linux kernel? No? Your just blathering about the phobias and fears that only exist between your ears? Yes, we thought so
Hey Chuckles. You don't know for a FACT that burglars have their sights set on your property. So show us some confidence and leave your doors unlocked and your keys on the dashboard.
Trust me, the agency responsible for this leak will NOT be penalized enough to be more careful in the future. This is effectively immunization, and that's better for business than any insurance policy. They calculate the losses (in lost profit + lawsuits, etc.) vs the expense of better safety, and whichever is cheapest wins. Who cares if 1600 customers are roasted in their own juices, when the expense of greater safety is larger than the profits those customers would have provided? :D
Neither the CO2, nor the natural gas in question, is just rising due to buoyancy. The weight of the thousands of feet of rock holds the gas under pressure. It's like a whoopie cushion with a stack of 99 cinder blocks on top of it. It's actually physically impossible to store gas underground at surface-level densities. It takes a lot of pressure to force it down there, but the advantage is that you don't need power to extract this gas; just a pressure regulator. The earth is full of cracks and holes, most of which are pressed tightly together, making an airtight seal. Evidently the earth around this exhausted oil well isn't sealed tightly enough, at least not any more. In the case of this natural gas, like the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, the regulators and valves have been circumvented. Any gas (or liquid) sequestered in this manner will shoot up like a rocket for months or years. CO2 will fill up nearby valleys and flow along low-lying paths. Until the reserve runs out, it would create a zone lethal to animals.
Something said in another article about this leak, was that they *don't* try to burn them off, because it complicates the repair. I get the impression that the facility this leak is at is still open for business. The heat from the fire would force workers to keep a greater distance, and destroy equipment which the gas plume alone doesn't harm. It also seems that the leak is not coming out of a broken pipe, but rather from where it emerges, or even cracks in the ground nearby it. A fire fed like this might move around, pop up in unexpected places, and perhaps disintegrate the ground underneath the facility. Burnt, it's better for the environment, but set alight, it might never be put out.
You misunderstand. This is not a production well, it is a storage well. This is natural gas which has already been pumped topside, treated with scent, and has been forced back underground into an expired oil well. It's a super-cheap way to store fuel, but in the minds of those who are not legally immunized from disasters like this one, extremely risky. When storage wells like this crack open, there's almost nothing that can be done, and no ability to do anything quickly in any case.
I agree. It would be better to disguise your data as normal traffic!
Bittorrent might be an ideal choice, since we've seen evidence that the sp00ks discard that traffic wholesale. You'd set up a legit bittorrent repository with a few thousand popular files, on a server which publicly appears to enforce a strict up/download ratio, which would help explain why so many clients stayed connected for long times downloading small chunks. Your own client would essentially join a cloud of encrypted proxies and contribute relay services.
Other good choices would be disguising traffic as https browsing blogs, forums and decentralized social networks. Your obfuscation server would be like a plugin to these kinds of legitimate public servers. It would look just like people were just catching up on news and posts. The higher the traffic the site has, the better. Occasionally, we might see major websites get hacked to include the obfuscation feature for a few days here and there. Sp00ks will have to log all https traffic to and from cnn, yahoo, google, microsoft, lolz!
Since sp00ks count bytes to determine what page you're looking at, even when using https, the obfuscation server could pad the packets to simulate a walk through various actual threads or web pages it hosts.
Any phone calls or metadata collected during this operation will be ATTRIBUTED to the airplane. Understand citizen?
Here here! Gnome over VNC is so clumsy and fragile. You'd think they hadn't bothered to try it out after writhing that POS called Vino. To get into some of my newer Linux boxen from windoze, I have to VNC to an older Linux and VNC on again due to Vino not supporting the encryption available in windoze VNC clients. And the work-arounds simply don't work for me. Would consider an alternate client if it weren't $$.
Everything I read about the search for alien life, and the search for new places for Humanity to live seems to follow an unquestioned narrative about how do we find a Sunlike star? How do we find an Earthlike planet? When are we going to colonize Mars and Venus? Wheeee!
...thousands of colonies in Earth-Moon vicinity. Later, we'll take on Mars' moons. After that, we have the asteroids. That should keep us busy for a million years.
The only natural place Mankind can live properly is on Earth. Other places can be made survivable, if you're willing to live under domes or in tunnels like frail, albino morlocks. But gravity is one thing we can never make right. And it's a vital issue. Let's set aside the Earthlike gravity in the acid clouds of Venus or the cloud-tops of Saturn. I mean, really.
It's with an ironic eye that I notice all of the technology being talked about, to build habitats on the Moon and Mars are even more suited for building in orbit. And without the great risk and expense of dropping it, along with it's population, onto a planet's surface intact. After you've dropped all these things down on Mars, you have to exploit Mars for the tremendous resources to launch anything back up again. And for what? Are we selling Martian cookware to Earthlings at $10,000,000.00/ea? Anything we toss down a gravity well is basically staying there. It's lost. And it cost a lot.
So, let's simply stay in orbit and use 3D printing technology to build rotating colonies out of crushed, sintered rock. You can't just spin a natural body; it's going to be too fragile, too flawed. But we're going to be mining these things, pulverizing them for minerals and chemicals. We can just build home out of the tailings. And the insides of these colonies will be tailored perfectly for us - no compromises, no need for genetic experimentation. Probably all built by robots, or at least by telepresence, after the first couple of generations.
We don't need a certain kind of planet, and we don't even need a certain kind of star. All we need is a power source that we can adapt our machines to, and raw material floating free to assemble into these rocky tubes.
We'll start by establishing a robotic factory on the Moon to toss up refined aluminum, iron and packages of powdered rock. We'll use that to build
I'm not saying we won't, or shouldn't visit the planets, but they simply won't be worth more than scientific outposts, or tourist resorts, even after we someday have cheap, safe means to land on and launch off of planets (probably orbital skyhooks).
Well, planets which are practically identical to Earth would have advantages... provided you intended to abandon space for ground living again. Remember, my point is that once you're in orbit, everything you need is in easy reach. Why go back to ground again? If a planet isn't Earth, then it won't be much like Earth anyway.
I'm at a loss to understand why you're so fixated with living on planets. That you would consider almost any planet or moon over a colony. Colonies will be easier to build with existing material in orbit, and promise ideal living conditions, while planets and moons will be expensive and dangerous to get on and off of, and provide unnatural living conditions.
Swiss Cheese Planets:
Tunneling Luna, other moons or planets is still pointless. You don't take into account that due to structural needs, you'll have to leave a lot of solid rock untouched, and you'll still only be able to go down a few miles, wasting most of the interior. And the excavated material needs to be taken into account, as it must be dumped atop the ground outside, creating more pressure. A manufactured colony shell will be much thinner, stronger and bear very little weight other than it's own. If you were a giant, and could hold it, it would feel like a kite. It'll still be plenty thick to stop any ionizing radiation, perhaps even a nearby supernova extinction event that sterilizes Earth.
Tunnels and chambers in a world other than Earth (or Venus) would have the wrong gravity for modern humans. They'd be no place to live. Because we know that microgravity causes the human body to malfunction, it is not valid to assume (or hope, really) that merely "low" gravity will be just dandy. It may also turn out that centripetal pseudogravity doesn't fool the body into behaving either, but then that means we'll never live in space at all. I think that 1-G pseudogravity is more likely to work than various low gravity environments. Those "tidal forces" are believed to be imperceptible on a colony of a few hundred meters diameter. We can build that. Tensile strength is a non-issue. Ordinary asteroid rock is thought strong enough, but these colonies will be built out of an almost ceramic concrete sintered in place with solar light like a gigantic 3D printer. The walls will be cellular or corrugated for even more strength and utility. Your "honeycombed" moon idea will be full of natural flaws and material variations. It'll collapse under it's own weight unless you're a very conservative architect.
Impacts:
The shell of the colonies will be built in layers with embedded tunnels and chambers. Places to run pipes and subways, install machinery and hydroponics, rooms to store raw materials. High-energy impacts might pierce the outermost layer, but then an interesting thing happens. The debris showers across the next level with far less impact, likely being contained. This does not happen with a thick single layer. I don't know just how common impacts are in near-Earth space right now; they'll likely be worse after we've been tossing bags of crushed rock into low-lunar orbit to use in the solar forges, but it appears that the satellites we've launched are only encountering micrometeorites chipping and scratching at them. Oh, and that damn Chinese debris. Our mining debris will likely be fairly low-energy because our orbital stations and activities will all be done at relatively similar speeds. Destructive impacts could be a once-in-a-lifetime event. So we can design to survive that.
Illumination:
Because of these micrometeorites, as well as the bigger rocks, I don't like the idea of our colonies featuring gigantic windows to let in sunlight. I love the idea of living inside an O'Neil Cylinder, but those mammoth windows and mirrors make me cringe. Someone who understands optics would probably like to tweak my solution: I would go for a significantly smaller single solar window at the tip-end of the colony (assuming a cylindrical shape) and which is inset within a wall or length of
First of all, I'm not considering your idea of moving stars and planets. It's a far higher level of technology, which does not need to be attached to the concept of building colonies.
You seem to completely miss the point of building orbital colonies. The object is to provide quality living space for modern humans living off-world. They're not built for portability or convenient access to Earth. Virtually every orbital colony will be non-mobile. They'll be custom built for the orbit they're constructed in, essentially exchanging places with the asteroid they were built from. The colony's outer shells will be a dozen meters thick. The colonists will live on the INSIDE where the radiation ISN'T at. Their interiors will be climate controlled for modern humans and posthumans. Heat will generally not be a problem. Actually, getting rid of excess heat could be. But that's a separate issue.
It would actually be orders of magnitude more difficult to engineer the tunneling of a planet than it would be to just crack it apart and build orbital colonies out of the rubble. Demolition also makes far more building material available. But that would come gigayears later, when the manageable rocks and moons had been used up. Demolishing planets is also a level of technology unnecessary to filling the solar system with a million orbital colonies. There's only one planet we could "honeycomb" (well, two if you disregard the super-high temperature and high-pressure acid of Venus - nope), and that is Earth. Living under Earth is not living in space. All of the other planets have gravity that is too low or too high for healthy human life. Living forever inside tunnels within the planets and moons is for mutant albino morlocks. Folks have GOT to give up their fetish for colonizing planets! Essentially, we neither can, nor need to honeycomb any planets.
Addressing your misunderstanding about dwarf stars: Most of the stars in the universe are, or will be, super-long-lived dwarf stars. Obviously, no-one's going to colonize an unstable system, but dwarf stars, brown and red, are actually the most stable. Excluding white dwarfs in close proximity to another star or black hole. And those are very rare.
Organics are simply what our form of life is made of; it doesn't imply it was made BY something living. It's just a class of molecules. The universe is filled with organic matter which is not living.
Our first space mining outpost will be on the moon, and the first major colonies will be built around the moon and Earth in Lagrange orbits. These colonies will primarily be homes for the builders of orbital power stations and spacecraft. Virtually all of the material will come from the moon, launched by electric-powered mass drivers. The material they're built of will simply be a kind of ceramic concrete made from superheated lunar rock dust. The structural mass doubles as radiation shielding. Some colonies will be very large, with the ground area of a whole county inside. At this scale, folks will feel centripetal force almost like real gravity.
It will take a very long time til we run out of moon to build with, but our next step will be to mine the moons of Mars and build orbital colonies there. These colonies will more likely be independent, and not reliant on relationships with Earth. I thought Mercury would make a good next step, being so close to the free energy from the Sun, and only a little bigger than the moon, but it seems that it's gravity is almost as much as Mars. There might be surface operations there which beam power back to Earth and all around the whole system. The asteroids and other stray rocks come after that.
Other than our own big moon, since it's so close to us and it's all we've got for now, the other moons will be used starting with the smallest. The planets will be visited eventually, but not permanently inhabited, until we have some very cheap and safe way to get on and off. Planet-based habitats (surface, airborne, floating) on/at Mars, Venus and the moon will be concerned with science and business, or even leisure, but they simply will never make good places for modern humans to live. If we mutate into winnowy cave-dwelling morlocks, then those might be happy there.
Asteroid mining will involve surrounding a rock with a sort of bag, to keep all of the material from flying away and causing navigational hazards. These bags might be abandoned when the operation is finished. Colonists might seek these out for a rich source of pre-digested material. Some of the bags may intentionally be the right size and shape to line with sintered rock and simultaneously build a colony. It's interesting to think of the colonies and the objects they're built out of as cells or virus membranes. Humanity might be the DNA of a new breed of space virus.
I wasn't aware that we'd explored all of space, and that the hunt for alien life was over. I was actually under the impression that we've only been eyeballing nearby rocks and making skywizard-influenced conclusions about how things work and why! And we've only been doing this for less time than the length of the kind of journey we're talking about here.
But, get back to me in a thousand years when we've adopted, and abandoned, hundreds of totally new ways to communicate with each other and observe the heavens. Chances are, aliens aren't using 4G or VHF. It's possible that we just don't know how to detect a Dyson Swarm of colonies over these distances yet.
In closing, I never said there was a source of energy in interstellar space. However, we might find that there is. Otherwise, travelers would bring one with them, or have the power transmitted via tight beam from home. These are all well-known scenarios.
A civilization sufficiently advanced enough to move their whole star system would probably not be so attached to genuine planetside living that they'd go to all that trouble. They could simulate normal life perfectly inside orbital colonies. I can't think of any sort of being which would wish to travel personally to the stars, and yet could not leave home soil. Even a mountain-sized plant. or something like it, could live in a custom colony. And the kind of stars that would make a good gigarocket are not all that long-lived. That level of technology would easily be able to move colonies almost anywhere.
As for terraforming; The other planets would be more useful if broken up for raw materials to build orbital colonies. Long after the asteroids and other moons had been used up. The result would be millions of times the surface area of a mere planet, and it would all be built to perfectly comfortable climate. Colonizing Mars, Venus or moons is just a daft idea. Scientific and mining stations, sure. But the walloping majority of mankind will be in orbital colonies. This is infinitely easier than dealing with wrong gravity, pressure, temperatures and chemistry of planets other than Earth. If we ever start a terraforming program, we will not benefit from it. Aliens that rise and explore the galaxy long after we've died off might stumble upon some and use them. But why would we launch such a program?
It seems likely that mankind, and aliens who got started before us, will eventually establish permanent residences off of their home planets. In the not-so-distant future, the majority of mankind, by percentage, will live off-Earth. However, you should think of the planets as being the bottom of very deep holes, with most of them being too hot, cold, poisonous, exposed to radiation, or too much or too little pressure. The task of getting and leaving these places is risky and expensive, too. Let's just give up on the idea of colonizing Mars for the forseeable future, please! It may not always be so, but the solar system's orbital rocks are easier resources to get, and spitting up material from low-gravity objects with mass drivers. There's no point to terraforming a planet when that will take thousands of years, and no human civillization can keep a project like that, and it's cash flow, going for so long.
In short, we're just not gonna live like pale, stick-figure trolls in underground caverns on the moon or mars. Mining will be done by pulling a big bag over an asteroid and breaking it up from the outside in. Attached refining equipment will separate useful elements and chemicals. This will be mostly-automated. We'll use the tailings as concrete to build our colonies. A gigantic mirror will heat the crushed rock and sinter it into shape, like an enormous 3d printer. There is enough material to build millions of them in OUR OWN solar system, and they'll be essentially self-sustaining once they've been established. Conditions inside will be perfect for human life. It's a far better prospect than making do with low-gravity moons and poisonous planetary atmospheres. Groups of colonies might form "countries" and others will operate independently. The colonies will be built robotically, so the cost will eventually drop to the point where one might be owned by a single family or other social group.
While most colonies will participate in a humanity-wide economic and social network, a life of physical isolation and self-sufficiency will be the norm for most. We'll be in communication, but not often physically visiting other colonies. Some of these may try hurtling themselves onward to the next closest star. They'll stay in touch the whole time, they'll just be permanently out of reach from then on.
The stars DO NOT need to be sun-like, nor do they need Earth-like worlds! They just need to have exploitable resources in easy reach. Red and brown dwarfs are more plentiful than any other type, and they'll last orders of magnitude longer, too. This is probably where the majority of intelligent life will live at some point. Not to miss out on any exploitable resource, those who live around dwarf stars will push onward to practically every type of star within reach. A million years or so, and we'll have colonies throughout the galaxy, and hundreds of alien neighbors to enrich our culture and science.
...and underwear!
Met Steve in person, of course. Nice guy, but quiet. And his brother Ken Jackson was the owner/boss/ mgt. of note.
IO had less than 5,000 customers, less than 20 staff, and brought in about a million in revenues per year. Here's a snapshot of the ISP's web v1.0 era website:
http://fondoo.net/~io
Anyone wanna slashdot me? Would be an honor! LOL