When will we be able to afford space settlement?

G EddieA95 wrote:

No you don't. The world is running out of oil. We need every watt we can
capture from nonoil sources. And with oil getting more expensive, CO2 and its
associated greenhouse effect will become self-terminating.

Now, if you sunshield were in fact a gigantic SPS, you may have a point.


SPS replaces fixed generation facilities that are mostly not oil-fired
(especially at today's oil prices.)

Paul

"Paul F. Dietz" wrote in message ...
The idea I have would be to mine the moon for materials that can
be vaporized near the Earth-Sun L1 point. The atoms and small clusters
in the vapor would scatter sunlight in certain narrow bands by
resonance scattering or fluorescence. The gas would be accelerated
toward Earth by light pressure, doppler broadening the bands (the
higher the acceleration the better.)

Exciting! But does it call for a permanent human settlement?
Or can this be done robotically?

jjustwwondering wrote:

Exciting! But does it call for a permanent human settlement?
Or can this be done robotically?

My take on that would be: if robotics advances to the point
that it could be done without people, then this would also make
a permanent human settlement much easier.

Paul

"Paul F. Dietz" wrote in message
...

You may not be correct, John. My BotE calculations suggest
that surprisingly little mass need be moved to the Earth-Sun L1
point to significantly reduce insolation at Earth, if you arrange
the system properly.

The idea I have would be to mine the moon for materials that can
be vaporized near the Earth-Sun L1 point. The atoms and small
clusters in the vapor would scatter sunlight in certain narrow
bands by resonance scattering or fluorescence. The gas would
be accelerated toward Earth by light pressure, doppler
broadening the bands (the higher the acceleration the better.)

An alternate idea would be to fabricate very small dipole
scatterers and releases them near earth-sun L1 (essentially,
micron scale solar sails.) Short carbon nanotubes could work.

Paul

The problem I have with this is that I just do not think it is
economically competitive with similar earth based options, (there are
many). A conventional nuclear winter on earth, the distribution of dust
into the upper atmosphere as per volcanoes and the like has a similar
effect.

While you need roughly a hundred times the dust, you also need roughly a
hundredth the energy to boost it, overall energy consumption is similar.
Very tall towers, ballistic systems or roughly ten 747s, (full time
operation) can be used. Estimated costs are about a billion per annum,
(somewhat less than Kyoto :-) ), average dust resident time in the
upper atmosphere is about three years.

This gives cheap and direct climate control and might also enable a
degree of localized control. A degree of local climate control, which
is economically desirable, can in time make the global warming issue
largely irrelevant.

Unfortunately for political reasons this does not sit well with many
scientists, who are still in the, food causes fat therefore to stop
obesity we should eliminate all food, mind set. They make the problem m
ore than a hundred times worse than it actually is and I will never
forgive them for such intellectual stupidity/dishonesty.

Sorry for the rant,
Pete.

SPS, with current technology, are not cost effective and their
potential as weaponry is so high that they will be politically
impossible to deploy.

Oil-from-trash systems are in their infancy, but show much more profit
potential than SPS does.

As for climate control - who is going to pay for the system to be
deployed, and why? It would be a lot cheaper to cut down on CO2
emmissins, and we won't do that, either. Plus Global warming (if it
occurs at all) is a net benefit, as more land becomes arable and polar
latitude winters become less severe, something that will eventually be
realized.

John Ordover wrote:

As for climate control - who is going to pay for the system to be
deployed, and why? It would be a lot cheaper to cut down on CO2
emmissins, and we won't do that, either.

It's not at all clear it will be cheaper to cut down on CO2 emissions.
Remember, to stabilize atmospheric CO2 will require long term
reduction of the CO2 emission rate by up to 90%, and this has
to happen while India, China, and other relatively poor countries
rapidly industrialize.

Paul

(Dez Akin) wrote:
I believe that as the economy grows and technology advances,
commercial space ventures will become affordable, but not for a long
time. Does anyone want to look into the crystal ball and see whether
space is still dominated by government prestige and defence programs
still by 2050?

With a space tether you can transfer the momentum from a tourist
returning to earth to a tourist coming up into space. This makes
it possible to have far cheaper flights, like $50,000
for a week in space. At this kind of price the market should
be very large. For every 20,000 tickets sold at this price you
gross another billion dollars.

We won't know for sure the exact size
of the market until it is a real market, but it seems to be
more than $10 billion per year. Note that the total world tourism
market is around $400 billion/year. Whatever the exact market is,
it seems plenty big enough to justify the development of a suborbital
RLV, the tether, and a hotel. Of course this is assuming that
the development is done by a private venture with people and structures
like those at scaled.com or spacex.com and not a bureaucracy
like at nasa.gov.

Once you have a hotel you will have employees and some
long term customers (paying by the year and not the week).
You will also want to grow food, recycle water, etc.
I think this will mark the start of "space settlement".

I think this will dominate government space programs well
before 2050, maybe even by 2020. I really think it is possible
that someone like Spacex could have a 400 room hotel in space
before NASA gets people back to the moon. Space tethers
exchanging momentum for tourists coming/going to the moon
would make tourism to the moon not much harder than just
getting into orbit. People would pay much more to go to
the moon, and orbital customers would come back for a moon
trip. So tourism to the moon should follow soon after volume
tourism to orbit.

With tethers you really like 2 way traffic, since you can
exchange the momentum. But the traffic just needs to be
near balanced in terms of mass, it does not have to be the
same stuff. So you can send people to the moon and bring
back the same mass of moon rocks and things will be great.
So sending settlers and their equipment (one way traffic)
to the moon is actually easier than sending them to orbit.
So big settlements on the moon will happen soon after
volume tourism to the moon. My guess is by 2030.

-- Vince

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Vincent Cate Space Tether Enthusiast
http://spacetethers.com/
Anguilla, East Caribbean http://offshore.ai/vince
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You have to take life as it happens, but you should try to make it
happen the way you want to take it. - German Proverb

"John Ordover" wrote in message
om...
SPS, with current technology, are not cost effective and their
potential as weaponry is so high that they will be politically
impossible to deploy.

Oil-from-trash systems are in their infancy, but show much more profit
potential than SPS does.

As for climate control - who is going to pay for the system to be
deployed, and why? It would be a lot cheaper to cut down on CO2
emmissins, and we won't do that, either. Plus Global warming (if it
occurs at all) is a net benefit, as more land becomes arable and polar
latitude winters become less severe, something that will eventually be
realized.

Actually we don't know what the net benefit may be. Some lowland areas will
be flooded.

Also, the increased energy in the atmosphere is among many models predicted
to lead to increased strength in tropical storms which potentially means
billions more in damage, etc.

Greg D. Moore (Strider) a écrit dans le
message : ...

"John Ordover" wrote in message
om...
SPS, with current technology, are not cost effective and their
potential as weaponry is so high that they will be politically
impossible to deploy.

Oil-from-trash systems are in their infancy, but show much more profit
potential than SPS does.

As for climate control - who is going to pay for the system to be
deployed, and why? It would be a lot cheaper to cut down on CO2
emmissins, and we won't do that, either. Plus Global warming (if it
occurs at all) is a net benefit, as more land becomes arable and polar
latitude winters become less severe, something that will eventually be
realized.

Actually we don't know what the net benefit may be. Some lowland areas
will
be flooded.

Also, the increased energy in the atmosphere is among many models
predicted
to lead to increased strength in tropical storms which potentially means
billions more in damage, etc.

Not to mention what happens if a global warming model goes berserk by
modifying the planetary albedo ( vide Venus )

(James Nicoll) :

In article ,
william mook wrote:

In the 1950s it was unbelievable that anyone but an international
corporation could make use of a computer. By the 1970s costs had
dropped to the point that we had games on computers. By the 1990s
there were more computers connected to a vast global computer network
known as the internet, than there were TVs in the 1950s.

Anyone in 1950 asking what the world of computing would be like in
2000 would be dumbfounded by the answer - it would appear overly
optimistic by many many times.

I get to read a lot of older SF as part of my job and I have
come across a few stories that knew about Moore's Law, if not by that
name. Unfortunately, they then tended to miss other potentials, like
that Futurism piece that predicted cell phone-like devices in cars,
except that the author thought you'd have to pull over and plug them
in.

I wish I could remember which story it was but the author
nailed the Moore's Law end of things, but completely missed the PC
possibilies. Computation was very cheap but you had to connect to
the Mother of All Computers first.

ObWWW: _A Logic Named Joe_. Better search engine than google,
anyway.

ShockWave Rider?

E.C.P
--
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