I want more space.  Specifically, I want more off-planet exploration.  The problem is I don’t see the government–any government–doing as much as I would like to see.  Which means hoping for a commercial effort, and although there are a few efforts in that regard, it’s honestly not much and, in my opinion, what is there is not ambitious enough.

 

The most promising commercial effort currently is building a space elevator.  This may sound like fantasy or at least science fiction, but the concept has been around since 1895.  The most notable commercial effort is the LiftPort group, which has been working on the concept since 2003.  Current efforts are focused on the development of carbon nanotubes, a material both lightweight and strong enough to be usable for this effort.  LiftPort has a couple of sites picked out and are waiting mostly on money and further refinement of the nanotube technology.  Google is also purportedly working on a space elevator.

 

This is cool, but not quite far enough.  Also, it gets us to space cheaper, but doesn’t, by itself, explore space.  There is one commercial effort worth mentioning, and that is Mars One.  The plan is to send four people to Mars by 2023 to establish a permanent colony.  Four people would be added every two years after that.  This is great, but…seriously?  Four people?  Don’t get me wrong, getting people to Mars is fantastic and I know they will find four people willing to spend the rest of their lives in nearly complete isolation from the rest of mankind…but what kind of people would they be?  Probably no one I would want to know.  No offense to whoever they might be, but they would have to be very limited on sociability to want to be isolated like that.  After the first decade, your social circle would have twelve people in it, including yourself.  Bah, I say.

 

I have a better idea.  Several of them, in fact.  I’ll start with Mars.  Don’t send four people, send two hundred.  And before you send those two hundred, send a crapload of robots to set up the colony.  Sure, the first few colonists could do that, but why?  Wouldn’t it be better for them to already have their new home set up and waiting for them?  Send a bunch of robots with supplies to build it.  While the robots are being sent, build a big ship in space, one too big to be launched from Earth.  Big enough to hold a few space shuttles.  Assembled in space by robots.  Back on Earth, build a few space shuttles.  (Read that as “reusable space vehicles,” not specifically space shuttles as designed and flown by NASA.)  On the target date, load up the shuttles and send them on a few trips, ferrying people from Earth to the fully-assembled mother ship.  Fly the mother ship to Mars, use the shuttles to ferry people to their new home.  Boom, instant colony.  Design the shuttles to be lightweight enough to act as ordinary planes once at Mars for long-range surface explorations.

 

Of course, there’s no reason to be limited to Mars.  There are a number of moons going around Saturn or Jupiter worthy and capable of supporting a colony.  Same process as above–shuttles, mother ship, robots pre-assembling the colony.  A colleague of mine–who inspired today’s post–also suggested a cloud city on Venus.  Trickier to do than the Martian or gas giant moon colonies, but still doable.

 

Being the dreamer I am, my own thoughts go beyond that.  With all these robots scrambling around doing construction work, send out a few to do some destruction.  Okay, not really destruction, but reconfiguration.  Harvest asteroids, small moons, Kuiper belt objects and the upper portions of gas giant atmospheres.  Take this raw material and refine it to make a Dyson’s Donut.  This is a variation on the concept of a Dyson’s Sphere.  For those who don’t know, that’s a giant ball which completely encases a star.  Living space would be on the inside of the sphere.  It’s a great idea, but, well, construction issues aside, would block out the sun from the solar system.  So I am suggesting a much smaller concept, a torus or, as I put it, a donut.  Basically a giant tube going around the sun.

 

Here are my specifics:  First, the tube is composed of lots of smaller tubes.  Each tube is not circular, but actually a hexdecagon (sixteen-sided polygon).  Each side is a one kilometer square.  That’s pretty big; it gives you a roughly five kilometer diameter (a little over three miles for those on the English system).  My proposal is to place it roughly halfway between Earth and Venus, giving it a diameter of about two-hundred seventy-nine million kilometers.  That gives it an internal surface area about twenty-seven times the surface area of Earth.  Unlike Earth, it would not be seventy percent water, but (obviously) there would still need to be a lot of water.  The sections could spin to create artificial gravity.  Optionally, it could revolve around the sun (possibly at the same speed as Earth to make travel a little easier) and/or rotate like the giant wheel it would be (not sure what advantage this would have, if any).

 

Some might wonder if there’s enough raw material for this in the solar system.  Keep in mind, however, the surface area may be twenty-seven times that of Earth, but with Earth’s depth.  The surface might only be a few meters thick.  Even if the whole thing was solid mass and we rounded up to six kilometers thick, that’s like going less than one-hundred eighty kilometers into the Earth.  The Earth’s radius is about six-thousand, three-hundred eighty kilometers, so even if we shaved our planet to get the raw material we’d still have lots left over to live on.

 

Now, all of this sounds fantastic, but none of it involves technology which hasn’t been invented yet.  Sure, there would be a few engineering problems to be figured out, but we know how to build spacecraft and we know how to mine and we know how to refine materials.  It can be done.  LiftPort has gone to Kickstarter; maybe I will, too.  See you in the future.