{"id":730,"date":"2012-10-16T07:23:25","date_gmt":"2012-10-16T13:23:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/?p=730"},"modified":"2012-10-16T07:23:25","modified_gmt":"2012-10-16T13:23:25","slug":"spaced-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/?p=730","title":{"rendered":"Spaced Out!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I want more space.\u00a0 Specifically, I want more off-planet exploration.\u00a0 The problem is I don’t see the government–any<\/em> government–doing as much as I would like to see.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The most promising commercial effort currently is building a space elevator.\u00a0 This may sound like fantasy or at least science fiction, but the concept has been around since 1895.\u00a0 The most notable commercial effort is the LiftPort group<\/a>, which has been working on the concept since 2003.\u00a0 Current efforts are focused on the development of carbon nanotubes, a material both lightweight and strong enough to be usable for this effort.\u00a0 LiftPort has a couple of sites picked out and are waiting mostly on money and further refinement of the nanotube technology.\u00a0 Google is also purportedly working on a space elevator.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This is cool, but not quite far enough.\u00a0 Also, it gets us to<\/em> space cheaper, but doesn’t, by itself, explore space.\u00a0 There is one commercial effort worth mentioning, and that is Mars One<\/a>.\u00a0 The plan is to send four people to Mars by 2023 to establish a permanent colony.\u00a0 Four people would be added every two years after that.\u00a0 This is great, but…seriously?\u00a0 Four people?\u00a0 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?\u00a0 Probably no one I would want to know.\u00a0 No offense to whoever they might be, but they would have to be very limited on sociability to want to be isolated like that.\u00a0 After the first decade, your social circle would have twelve people in it, including yourself.\u00a0 Bah, I say.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I have a better idea.\u00a0 Several of them, in fact.\u00a0 I’ll start with Mars.\u00a0 Don’t send four people, send two hundred.\u00a0 And before you send those two hundred, send a crapload of robots to set up the colony.\u00a0 Sure, the first few colonists could do that, but why?\u00a0 Wouldn’t it be better for them to already have their new home set up and waiting for them?\u00a0 Send a bunch of robots with supplies to build it.\u00a0 While the robots are being sent, build a big ship in space, one too big to be launched from Earth.\u00a0 Big enough to hold a few space shuttles.\u00a0 Assembled in space by robots.\u00a0 Back on Earth, build a few space shuttles.\u00a0 (Read that as “reusable space vehicles,” not specifically space shuttles as designed and flown by NASA.)\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Fly the mother ship to Mars, use the shuttles to ferry people to their new home.\u00a0 Boom, instant colony.\u00a0 Design the shuttles to be lightweight enough to act as ordinary planes once at Mars for long-range surface explorations.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Of course, there’s no reason to be limited to Mars.\u00a0 There are a number of moons going around Saturn or Jupiter worthy and capable of supporting a colony.\u00a0 Same process as above–shuttles, mother ship, robots pre-assembling the colony.\u00a0 A colleague of mine–who inspired today’s post–also suggested a cloud city on Venus.\u00a0 Trickier to do than the Martian or gas giant moon colonies, but still doable.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Being the dreamer I am, my own thoughts go beyond that.\u00a0 With all these robots scrambling around doing construction work, send out a few to do some destruction.\u00a0 Okay, not really destruction, but reconfiguration.\u00a0 Harvest asteroids, small moons, Kuiper belt objects and the upper portions of gas giant atmospheres.\u00a0 Take this raw material and refine it to make a Dyson’s Donut.\u00a0 This is a variation on the concept of a Dyson’s Sphere.\u00a0 For those who don’t know, that’s a giant ball which completely encases a star.\u00a0 Living space would be on the inside of the sphere.\u00a0 It’s a great idea, but, well, construction issues aside, would block out the sun from the solar system.\u00a0 So I am suggesting a much smaller concept, a torus or, as I put it, a donut.\u00a0 Basically a giant tube going around the sun.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Here are my specifics:\u00a0 First, the tube is composed of lots of smaller tubes.\u00a0 Each tube is not circular, but actually a hexdecagon (sixteen-sided polygon).\u00a0 Each side is a one kilometer square.\u00a0 That’s pretty big; it gives you a roughly five kilometer diameter (a little over three miles for those on the English system).\u00a0 My proposal is to place it roughly halfway between Earth and Venus, giving it a diameter of about two-hundred seventy-nine million kilometers.\u00a0 That gives it an internal surface area about twenty-seven times the surface area of Earth.\u00a0 Unlike Earth, it would not be seventy percent water, but (obviously) there would still need to be a lot of water.\u00a0 The sections could spin to create artificial gravity.\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Some might wonder if there’s enough raw material for this in the solar system.\u00a0 Keep in mind, however, the surface area may be twenty-seven times that of Earth, but with Earth’s depth.\u00a0 The surface might only be a few meters thick.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Now, all of this sounds fantastic, but none of it involves technology which hasn’t been invented yet.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It can<\/em> be done.\u00a0 LiftPort has gone to Kickstarter; maybe I will, too.\u00a0 See you in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I want more space.\u00a0 Specifically, I want more off-planet exploration.\u00a0 The problem is I don’t see the government–any government–doing as much as I would like to see.\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=730"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":731,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730\/revisions\/731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}