Where Does Jeff Bezos Foresee Putting Space Colonists? Inside O'Neill Cylinders (geekwire.com) 151
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."
Re:This guy should order his meds from Amazon... (Score:5, Funny)
In the future you will be able to order an O'Neill cylinder from Amazon. Just don't get the cheap Chinese knock-off version.
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In the future, there will be huge Prime Day deals on O'Neill cylinders! Greatest thing ever!
(total of 3 available)
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And you get free, one way shipping.
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No, there's a nonzero chance that when the sun expands past the orbit of Earth, the planet will still be there and will be consumed, and that this will occur before a sufficiently large asteroid hits Earth. And technically, even if the planet has moved to higher orbit and doesn't get consumed, there won't be any species to make extinct at that point, so the asteroid won't be species-ending.
There's also a nonzero chance that we'
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It will be a species ending event, whether or not there is still a species to end.
Musk does want to terraform Mars and also has short term solutions to radiation, etc. But in broad strokes, Mars, as it is, is a much more forgiving environment for anything that goes wrong.
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and that this will occur before a sufficiently large asteroid hits Earth
So, these countries are wasting their money planning to destroy or deflect it then?
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/n... [pbs.org]
http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/sl9/b... [nasa.gov]
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No, for the same reason that buying car insurance isn't a waste of money even if there's a chance that you'll never be in a car accident.
And thus humanity is reborn (Score:1)
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 tim
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Mod up (Score:2)
For Mobile Suit Gundam reference.
And the name of the place? (Score:4, Funny)
wait, I only count four... (Score:2)
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.
Re:wait, I only count four... (Score:5, Funny)
It fell from orbit, sank into the swamp.
So I built a second one. That one fell from orbit, sank into the swamp.
So I built a third. That exploded, fell from orbit, then sank into the swamp.
The fourth one, that one was ripped from time and space by the great machine on the planet below.
So I built a fifth one. That one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Ivanova, the strongest space station in all of Earthforce!
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All my internets to you, good sir.
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When you're dealing with Jeff Bezos, it's more like Babble-On Five
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sue me
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Clarke Cylinder (Score:1)
Re:Clarke Cylinder (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, per wikipedia, the idea of a rotating cylindrical habitat was put forth in 1920 in "Beyond the Planet Earth", Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. (published in English in 1960)...
And maybe he's not the first either.
Besides, the O'Niell Cylinder is a very particular layout. The one in Rama was not an O'Neill cylinder AT ALL.
There was an ocean in Rama that was a ring around the center, and the habitat as i recall was the entire cylinder? (been years since I read it...) for example, while an ONeil cylinder in contrast has alternating lengthwise strips of habitat and windows (sky).
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. If anything it was an O'Neill Cylinder that was tailored to fit the forces that longitudinal space travel would impart upon it, with the high wall on one side of the "ocean".
Rama was a cylindrical rotating habitat, yes.
An Oneill cylinder, to me at least, and from what I can tell online is specifically:
Two counter rotating cylinders (to cancel out gryo effects) (Rama wasn't that)
Stripes of habit and windows (so the habitats had sky) (Rama wasn't that)
Rama was a rotating cylindrical habitat ship, but I don't think that's enough to make it an o'neill cylinder.
Still trying to decide if I want to read the somewhat ghost-written sequels or not
"noncomittal sound". I've read them... as the other commenter said, it's focused far more on the social aspects; and is a
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Ultimately, Gentry Lee's novels are not a story about Rama... it's about people. The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K Le Guin) is maybe something in the same ... genre as Gentry Lee's Rama books.
Good to know.
I'd previously read Eon by Greg Bear. Some of Rama's initial conditions reminded me of Eon's; with the obvious differences in the reveal of the origin, like Bear was inspired by Clarke but didn't want to write the same book.
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Ultimately, Gentry Lee's novels are not a story about Rama... it's about people. The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K Le Guin) is maybe something in the same ... genre as Gentry Lee's Rama books.
Good to know.
vux984 has pretty much nailed it describing the Rama sequels. Worth a read, but not at Clarke's level of mindfuckery.
I'd previously read Eon by Greg Bear. Some of Rama's initial conditions reminded me of Eon's; with the obvious differences in the reveal of the origin,
To me, Bear is Clarke's generational upgrade. If you've read Eon - do yourself a favor and read Eternity, Bear takes it to the next level and if you enjoyed Eon, you will not be disappointed. There is a reason why Eon is billed as the greatest sci-fi ever, it is, breathtaking scope and ideas that re-write the way your brain works. On that, I think Alistair Reynolds is Bear's generational upgr
Re:Clarke Cylinder (Score:5, Funny)
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.
It's true that Rama was, like an O'Neill Cylinder, a cylindrical habitat with rotational pseudogravity. However, Rama was made from unobtainium, while a true O'Neill Cylinder is instead made of unaffordium.
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If you have the resources you can built it, cost is an illusion created by greed (I can afford it by my rules, you can not afford it by my rules, don't agree, I will kill you either slowly in prison or fast with bullets). The access to resources is completely arbitrary in the cost model, can have millions of times more than you need but greed says some dickwad owns it all and you can not afford to buy it (perversely enough the same bullshit rules say you can have absolutely no resources and the same dick wa
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We get it, you're anti-capitalistic. So, in the hierarchy of needs, where (or how) do you expect people to get the motivation to build this, especially if they're not given a ticket for the ride? It will take years to build, and those people will need everything that they need right now just to live...how is that "funded"? Should we just call Habitat for Humanity? Sarcasm aside, I'd personally donate time to a project like that, but still gotta pay the bills.
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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.
That would probably help solve a bunch of other problems too, actually. If it was necessary to have more than one section in-rotation, so that counter-rotating forces allow the structure to otherwise maintain stationkeeping assuming that the center core sticks out the ends of the structure, that not-rotating core would be the place for the critical infrastructure to be housed. It would also allow for a transit-point between counter-rotating sections where the amount of risk for things like simple gasket f
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Just as air not in contact with the earth's surface does not rotate?
Newton's laws, know them.
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The center also has angular momentum (assuming light from the ends) or there is no center (assuming light through windows in the floor).
How much layering do you really expect if the mean free path of a molecule of air is on the order of the height of the space?
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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You might be more successful, particularly in the short to mid term, but you wouldn't necessarily be better off.
It depends on what your ultimate goals are. If your goals are simply more living space, there is certainly something to be said for ocean cities. If your goal is to decrease the load on Earth's ecosystem and resources, then going into space is necessary, because that's the only place where you aren't just finding a new way to cut up the same pie.
In space, you're building with resources that even
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You can't solve a Malthusian crisis by flying people off-planet in rockets. They breed faster than you can launch the rockets, and the rockets require far too much resource / energy to fly off.
Maybe achievable with a space elevator, but you still need somewhere to go to. The resources creating those places to go to are immense.
The only realistic cure for a Malthusian crisis are either birth control, or mass population loss.
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True, that that's not the only reason for this. There are potential extinction events that having a plan B would give humanity a chance to continue...think...disease, WWIII, asteroid or super volcano. That said, I'm curious what level of human population is sustainable...it will likely evolve with technological advancements.
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Let me repeat: you cannot live in Space for long periods of time. That will never change.
The health problems with space are radiation and lack of gravity. O'Neill Cylinders solve both problems.
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Mars is pretty hostile (much like you). Not enough atmosphere, not enough rad-shielding, not enough light to grow food, not enough gravity. You'd pretty much have to build underground, at which point, why do that on Mars? When space travel gets cheap enough, the answer will be "why not - the land's available", but that's the distant fuure.
Venusian cloud cities make a lot of sense, however. While you'd need airlocks and suits, you can scavenge breathable atmosphere from Venus' atmosphere, and there's not
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Mars gets almost half as much light as Earth (about 43%, to be more precise). Anything than can grow in partial shade should be able to grow on Mars without the need for artificial light supplementation. Fruits and root vegetables would be more problematic, of course, and would require solar concentrators, but that's still only a 2:1 ratio of ground space versus crop coverage, which isn't *that* insane.
We know the effects of no gravity, but it's rather hard
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How does Venus make more sense than Mars when anything else besides the atmospheric gases has to be imported? Or have you come up with a viable scheme for retrieving minerals from the surface?
On a long-ish time scale (at least relative to the current duration of the human civilization), you might be able to thicken your atmosphere to the point where radiation would be much less of a problem.
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You can quite a variety of stuff (including the ingredients for fertilizer) from the Venusian atmosphere. And water, which is fairly important. You don't have to have a fully closed ecosystem.
Sure, you have to bring the habitats either way, but at least on Venus you don't need to withstand a 1-atmosphere pressure differential.
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Of course it is dependent on Earth. We evolved on Earth. We cannot live anywhere else long term, unless we find an Earth like planet. The idea of living on Mars for long periods of time is comical. You would be better off trying to build cities in the ocean. It would be much cheaper and successful.
People constantly get colony and outpost confused.
A colony is usually described as somewhat self-sustaining. It's able to manufacture or otherwse provide for itself much of what it needs locally. It may still import, but if it's cut-off from its founders it won't immediately whither on the vine and die.
An outpost is a basically a forward-deployed facility. It does not self-sustain. If it does manage to produce anything locally, it's usually somewhat singular of-purpose, like a mining installation.
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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.
That's a general rule seen in many contexts: the larger a system is, and the more varied its contents (preferably including many subsystems / groups that work independently from each other), the more stable the whole will be. And/or the bigger the chance at least some of its citizens will survive a catastrophe. Size & numbers matter. Especially if "numbers" can be read as "varieties" rather than a larger count of the same thing(s).
So in terms of passing on genes, a city sized spac
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KSR is more fantasy than hard Science Fiction.
He also is really impressed with his own intellect. Readers not so much.
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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.
Ah, right, the "Earth is magical" argument.
Any chemical process required can be performed a different way. There's no magic here. There are a lot of details we don't yet know about, and many of them won't be discovered until we actually try it, but when we do we'll find the problems and devise solutions.
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But if the ecology of a self-sustaining space colony collapses, it will have to be evacuated.
No, it will have to be fixed.
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Bo-lock-s. Unadulterated bullshit of the highest ordure.
I've read one thing by KSR that caused me to file him (well, "her" for a long time. It's only recently that I've discovered that she is a he Whatever.) under "try more". Then I waded through the first of the "Multicolour Mars" series and found it amusing but not worth further wading. But if he has reall
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He's not an engineer is he.... (Score:1)
The only resources (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Planets and moons are larger and contain resources already.
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Or you just plan ahead and mine asteroids to build additional tubes that interconnect. As the population expands, so does the station.
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Dreamers (Score:1)
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I agree.
Extrapolate energy use out 500 years at 3% (when it's actually been declining recently)?
Extrapolate our current 6 billion population out 500 years at 3% and you get 15,731,263,000,000,000.
Stupid Jeff Bezos.
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It's more fun to calculate 1%/annum exponential growth to a very modest (even in terms of human history) years. I'll do it for you.
1 year: 1.01
10 years: 1.10
100 years: 2.70
1000 years: 21,000
10,000 years: 1.64E+43
100,000 years: 1.4E+432
1,000,000 years: 2.4E+4321
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LOL! Only two options, huh? Clearly, huh? So, solar cells in space - At 1 AU, 550 million times the Earth's surface area (1.1 billion when you consider only Earth's daylight side). Clearly not a possibility, huh? Clearly one of us is intellectually challenged.
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We will definitely need a lot of space based infrastructure, but I don't think we need Moon or Mars colonies to make that happen. I imagine we'd be more likely to generate infrastructure built with automation that does not require human presence or workforce using asteroid mining and automated fabrication. Ultimately, there's really no good reason to make our workforce out of humans in space.
Humans are great if you don't want to have to go to the trouble of making general purpose machines that will iterat
"This is the one you want to protect" (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:"This is the one you want to protect" (Score:4, Interesting)
BioSphere II [wikipedia.org] was a poorly planned theme-park garden now owned by the University of Arizona.
Want to see what can be done if you really understand ecology and not just theme park construction? Look at Ascension Island [wikipedia.org]. Joseph Hooker, with the aid of Charles Darwin and Kew gardens, built the ecosystem on the island out of completely foreign species. This cloud rainforest was built whole cloth on a bare lump of clinker sticking out of the ocean long before electrification.
The key difference is ocean.
Biosphere II was designed with almost no significant bodies of water containing phytoplankton, which produce up to 85% of all the oxygen [earthsky.org]. The facility has a glorified wake pool that would have fit in a large cities' water park. The planners put in 50% more grassland than synthetic ocean. Much of that 850m "ocean" is dedicated to a coral reef. Unsurprisingly, the oxygen levels crashed soon after closing the doors. Both times.
If one thing was unrealistic about O'Neil Colonies it was the sheer lack of mixing oceans in all the designs. Water is one of the most abundant substances outside the dry line in the Solar system. It's also a good radiation shield and has high thermal mass. The giant magic space windows that somehow didn't let in vast amounts of cosmic radiation were more realistic.
O'Neil also wrote about Bernal Spheres [nss.org]. These are slightly better, but have their own engineering challenges. Artists still show the interiors as if they were a cutout of a heavily populated Italian riverside. More relaistic would be 70-80% ocean with islands or peninsula. But in Bezo's case it's probably a matter of go big or go home. And the Island Three plans [wikipedia.org] are certainly Big Homes.
Tessier-Ashpool (Score:2)
The reasons (Score:2)
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?
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Cylinders? Bah! (Score:3)
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.
Re:Cylinders? Bah! (Score:4, Informative)
Energy budget (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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Most of the heavy industry isn't much/any cleaner, just further away from you.
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That it is really really easy to get things down into a gravity well.
In orbit? Just toss the package out the back fast enough and it comes down all on it's own. Take care to not hit anything on the way down.
Also, space colonization for real will the subject to huge limitations. Suppose you manufacture stuff in orbit and have the technology to ship it down to the ground. The landing process is the same technology
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Yes, dropping stuff from orbit is easy -- unless you want it to survive. Then you need as much structure as payload. This also doesn't account for the raw materials -- how do you get that to the orbital factories? This is, by definition, heavy industry, not smart watches. Cars, trucks, steel stock, drilling machines -- nothing small and light.
Thus my question about the energy budget.
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But everything I have read says the goal is to separate heavy industry and its pollution from humanity and the environment. Server farms contribbute nothing to pollution except energy production (presumably could be beamed down from orbital power stations) and cooling.
Agree on requirements before starting design! (Score:1)
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 bet
Cosmic rays (Score:1)
Old Sci Fi Cover (Score:1)
Reminds me of this [smorgasbord.us]
Suprise (Score:2)
Jeff Bezos read something someone else did and he wants to leverage it as his own? shocking.
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"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
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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
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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.
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Don't quit school. Study that earth science, or whatever they are calling it in middle school these days.
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I guess good advice if flamebait these days. GP needs to study, or there are lots and lots of french fries in his future.
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If you are Zion then you get a Zaku.
Gundam Mobile Suits were Federation