Questions about "The High Frontier"

Mike Combs schrieb:
"Matthias Warkus" wrote in message
...
Certainly; only there is so much solar power coming through the atmosphere
already that can be captured in pretty simple ways

The primary problem is not atmospheric scattering. It's that the sun sets
every night.

So you build several solar power stations all around the planet instead
of one and you link them with 21st-century high-technology devices
called cables. It'd probably still be at least one order of magnitude
cheaper than putting SPSes in orbit.

Note I don't think SPSes are a bad idea, but I do think there are better
ideas.

mawa
--
http://www.prellblog.de

: "Mike Combs"
: The primary problem is not atmospheric scattering. It's that the sun sets
: every night.

Ah. Lithoscattering.


Wayne Throop http://sheol.org/throopw

John Schilling wrote:
In my copy I'm reading about the fact that in a lot of ways, life on a
habitat would be considerably less free than on Earth. Population would
have to be strictly controlled,


Why? Wealthy, highly-educated populations (i.e. any plausible group of
space colonists)

Considering the way life is going to actually be on them if they are
built, at least in the early days, not as gated communities for the
wealthy, or Laputas for intellectuals to think profoundly from the
Olympian realm of the heavens, but as construction housing for people
doing something to make a profit for someone, the populace is going to
resemble the crew of a oil platform or the crew of the Nostromo.
They'll be up there to get money they can blow once they get Earthside
and out of the damn tin can.
If you have a mixed sex crew, expect infidelity and fistfights from day
one as jealousies and boredom with their sexual partners set in.
Unfortunately, we already have one case of a philandering male
astronaut, with a jealous female astronaut in lethal pursuit.
Don't think that moving things several tens of thousands of miles closer
to the Moon is going to change human behavior one iota.
Assuming that only wealthy, and highly intelligent people move up
there, someone is still going to have to do the ****work on a
day-to-day basis while they think deep thoughts, and what happens then
might be a neat version of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" with the air going
out replacing the water coming in.
It would be fun to figure out where the "wealth" of your hypothetical
populace is going to come from; if they are mining the Moon, then
whoever owns the mining colony is the one making the bucks. If it's
selling the right to live in the colony, then whoever physically owns
the colony is the one making the profits.
The world is full of very wealthy shipping magnates; how many of them
actually live on their container ships?

tend to breed at less than replacement rates, and half
a million kilometers of vacuum tends to be a pretty effective barrier
to immigration. The only "population control" mechanism I see any need
for, is a public debate over how much to subsidize immigration and/or
native babymaking.


Deciding you are going to have two children is nice; having someone
decide that you can only legally have two children, or that you _must_
have two children isn't.



and any form of dissidence that could present a danger to the habitat
stopped in its tracks. If I decide to secretly drill a hole in the
ground here on Earth, its unlikely the whole population of Jamestown,
ND will suffocate; that wouldn't be the case on a space habitat.


Yes, actually, it would. The population of the space habitat would be
in no particular danger of suffocation. What would happen is, sometime
later that day a couple representatives of that population would knock
on your door and say, "you're leaking air; can we come in and fix it?"


Followed shortly by the ruling council of the habitat saying "You are
causing problems for us; either you can leave via the next Earthbound
ship, or out the airlock, it's up to you to decide which."
Then one of three things happen:
1.) You head Earthside.
2.) You protest the decision, and the powers that be say that shows
dangerous tendencies that prove their decision to expel you was right.
3.) You protest the decision, and a lot of people agree with you and
decide to overthrow the ruling council.
Then the fun begins.
I forget which Israeli prime minister said: "Do you have any idea what
it's like to try and govern a country that has six million prime
ministers?" but the people that are going to gravitate to space colonies
are going to make the Israelis look politically disinterested by comparison.

On the outside chance that you said "No", it's an interesting question
whether they would A: break down your door and fix the leak anyhow, B:
lock your door from the outside and seal it up nice and airtight, or C:
order supplimentary air shipments from a neighboring habitat and bill
them to your account. Depends on the fine details of the habitat's
legal, political, and economic set-up. But either way, the only one
who'se in any danger of suffocation is you.


Lot of heavy internal walls in this place, aren't there?
Once the air starts getting a bit thin, you'll make the right decision,
won't you?
Welcome to tyranny.
Your options are A, B, or C...or you'll die.
Doesn't seem like much of a improvement on present day Earth
governments, does it?
But don't worry, it'll be a Utopia!
.....as long as you do A, B, or C.
And, really, not even you. Because you aren't going to secretly drill
a hole in the wall, and none of your neighbors believes you are liable
to secretly drill a hole in the wall.

Unless they don't like you for some reason, and decide that you are just
the sort of person who would do that, so it would be better if you just
were expelled right now before you put others in danger.
Or cause the cows to stop giving milk or something.

The security measures and legal
restrictions that people actually put in place, tend to be based on the
sorts of misbehavior that actually exist or that people believe are
likely to actually exist, not silly thought-experiment examples of what
could exist but doesn't and isn't expected to.


Your argument is that in a vacuum and very cramped living conditions
people are going to behave differently from how they behave on Earth,
and have behaved for several thousand years.
You want to talk about silly thought experiments, that's a beaut of one.
It might resemble life in modern Tokyo; everyone is incredibly polite to
each other, because you get even slightly out of line and the society
disowns you, so you are your best behavior all the time. It's the price
you pay and the cross you carry..and your only comfort is knowing that
everyone else hates it as much as you.


This sounds like a perfect set-up for something a lot more like a
fascist state than a libertarian paradise.


If a bunch of fascists establish the space colony in question, sure.


What if they decide to take it over? Most of Russia hated the Bolsheviks
as much as the Czars.
And during the rise of the Nazis in Germany, what everyone really wanted
was paper money that was worth more than toilet paper, and actually
having a full belly when you fell asleep in someplace that had heat in
the winter.
So... fascists establish a colony of their own...then one day, someone
decides that if they could double the size of the colony, they could
each own twice as much... so they could either work their asses off to
double the size of the colony...or blow a hole in the colony a few
thousand miles away, let everyone in it die, patch the hole, toss the
dead out the airlock (or use them for fertilizer or something... in
space organics are difficult to come by) repressurize it, and move in.
The second option is a lot faster, easier, and costs less.
What a plethora of space colonies look like is the Greek city states;
everyone keeping a close eye on everyone else, and trying to get more of
them on your side by intimidation or conquest than your rivals have.
One big difference though; thermonuclear weapons means that any space
city state that feels another one is a problem can eliminate it and its
population with fair ease.
Pretty soon their only choices are to get a powerful friend to protect
them, who they are beholden to, or have themselves as heavily armed as
Babylon 5 ended up as the series went on...the big friend who they were
beholden to was of course Earthforce, who sent them all the cool weapons.

People, in the short term at least, are a lot more amenable to the idea
of reshaping their environment to fit their desires than vice versa. Any
space colony, habitat, whatever, is going to reflect the desires of the
people who build it - in political and socioeconomic as well as physical
structure.

If it happens to be built by libertarians, then it will have a libertarian
political and socioeconomic setup;nobody is going to be demanding any
sort of fascist police state on account of they're afraid their fellow
libertarian space colonists are going to secretly murder them in their
sleep and they can't think of anything less than a fascist police state
capable of stopping that. And, you know, I'm pretty sure that if it is
ever put to the test, the libertarian space colonists will not in fact
be murdered in their sleep by their fellow libertarian space colonists
going around drilling holes in the walls or whatnot.



Oh, I'd love to see Libertarians actually try to make a functional
government on a space colony!
Seen from a safe distance, it could be hilarious to watch for the month
or so it actually was in existence, with the big bright flash in the
night sky being the perfect punchline to a downright dadaist joke.
"So...what happened to it?"
'There was an argument."
"About what exactly?"
"Someone said that Ayn Rand was a greater philosopher than Adam Smith."
"Well, that explains it then, doesn't it? What was the basis of their
argument?"
"They thought Rand had better sex scenes in her books." :-)

Pat

Mike Combs wrote:
"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...

provided that a political upset on board doesn't lead to chaos and their
own destruction as the factions fight it out like two fish in a aquarium
striving to be the first to blow up the aeration system to put the other
at a disadvantage.


Not a very logical-sounding scenario to me. That said, I'd agree that
death-cults would be a thing to avoid.


Look at human history, and note the few times when anyone has done the
"logical" thing.
What seems like the right thing to do is based on preconceptions, the
expectations of your populace, and what your nation "must" do in a
particular situation.
"They blew up the Twin Towers!"
"Somebody is going to pay for this!"
"Who?"
"I'm not sure yet...but somebody... bring me the short list of All The
World's Assholes...ah-huh...HIM..." ;-)

Pat

Mike Combs wrote:
Pat Flannery schrieb:

For starters, the reason they are going to exist isn't to give people a
really fun place to live, but make a buck.


True, but consider that maybe after SPS construction is in the black, there
might be a buck to be made providing Earthlings with a really fun place to
live.

Granted, that's predictated on two, perhaps three orders of magnitude
reduction in costs (and I mean even over what you have with the initial SPS
program), but mass production can work wonders.


Not in regards to the total amount of energy required to get goodies you
can only get on Earth, rather than make on the Moon, take to get to L5
or into GEO where the SPS will probably be located.
One way or another, you pay for the energy to accelerate things up from
0 up to over 18,000 mph.

Pat

Pat

In Matthias Warkus writes:

Mike Combs schrieb:
"Matthias Warkus" wrote in message
...
Certainly; only there is so much solar power coming through the atmosphere
already that can be captured in pretty simple ways

The primary problem is not atmospheric scattering. It's that the sun sets
every night.

So you build several solar power stations all around the planet instead
of one and you link them with 21st-century high-technology devices
called cables. It'd probably still be at least one order of magnitude
cheaper than putting SPSes in orbit.

Not necessary. Large scale solar thermal is perfectly capable
of 24-hour power generation - check out Ausra. There's some loss
of efficiency of course, but so what, it's cost per KWh that matters.

So. The consensus to the SPS question seems to be that such a project
is technically possible, but economically impossible, in much the same
way that...say...we could theoretically power the whole developed
world with billions of hamsters running around in really big wheels.

In that case, is there anything else -- besides simply putting
thousands of people in orbit for its own sake -- that an O'Neill
station would be better for than a smaller station or lunar colony?

wrote:

One way or another, you pay for the energy to accelerate things up from
0 up to over 18,000 mph.

28 kilowatt-hours per kilogram. Half that, actually. $1.40/kg.

That's just the energy, of course, not paying for the mechanisms of
getting up there, which currently rather suck. I'd guess benefits from
"mass production" would come as a space fountain/launch loop.

-xx- Damien X-)

Damien Sullivan wrote:

28 kilowatt-hours per kilogram. Half that, actually. $1.40/kg.


If we could just make it all-electric, we would be in business.
Maybe a giant railgun to shoot it right into orbit. Okay, so we may need
to train the crew to handle 500 or so gs on takeoff... :-)

Pat

Damien Valentine wrote:

So. The consensus to the SPS question seems to be that such a project
is technically possible, but economically impossible, in much the same
way that...say...we could theoretically power the whole developed
world with billions of hamsters running around in really big wheels.

The metaphor I prefer is extracting gold (or uranium, or whatever)
from seawater.

We know there are huge amounts out there. We definitely know how to do
it; the chemistry is simple enough, end the engineering is just big
dumb stuff. Doubtless at some level -- maybe a dam + pump + still +
precipitation unit stretching from Virginia Beach to Bermuda,
processing the Gulf Stream -- economies of scale would kick in enough
to pay for operations and turn a day-to-day profit.

But it ain't gonna happen in anything like today's
economic-technological context, because the upfront cost is so great
and the wait so long for positive cash flow -- and, more importantly,
for actual ROI: cumulative earnings great enough to outweigh not just
the construction cost, but the trillions in interest that accumulated
along the way. There are simply too many shorter-term, less uncertain,
more manageable investment opportunitiues for it to have a chance.