Questions about "The High Frontier"

In article ,
Monte Davis wrote:
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.

There's also the slight problem that much richer ores than
sea water exist. Nobody is going to sift the ocean for uranium when
there are far richer sources at hand.
--
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
http://www.cafepress.com/jdnicoll (For all your "The problem with
defending the English language [...]" T-shirt, cup and tote-bag needs)

On Sat, 06 Oct 2007 08:02:56 +0200, in a place far, far away, Matthias
Warkus made the phosphor on my
monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:

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.

With associated losses.

On Oct 8, 3:48 am, Johnny1a wrote:
On Oct 4, 5:26 am, Pat Flannery wrote:

The time frame of where the idea comes from is interesting; after the
counterculture communes of the late 1960s flopped and were looked back
upon as a great romantic dream that never panned out.
If you can't make it work in the real world...then build a new
world...literally, in this case. ;-)

Pat

No question about it, O'Neill's vision was conditioned by the time,
and in my opinion by his generation, or rather perhaps I should say by
the time in which he grew up. _High Frontier_ had a distinct edge of
dreamy 60s/70s wishful thinking about it.

But also with an edge of dystopianism. Remember the how the
galvanizing question was posed by O'Neill: "Is the surface of a planet
the right place for an expanding industrial civilization?" In an era
where J. Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb books were bestsellers, and
environmental consciousness was growing by leaps and bounds, this
wasn't a half-bad question.

And I'm not entirely sure the concerns he was addressing are now
moot. Yes, there seems to be a general pattern of declining birth
rates as GDP per capita improves, but there are some exceptions, and
one of them is India, IIRC. In other words, the lower-birth-rates
trend might be more culturally than economically determined.

200,000 new people a day? Well, if they are being *born* in space,
with semi-automated means for continuously expanding livable turf,
then you have the answer to the scenario O'Neill was worried about:
high rates of population growth and high rates of entry of the new
people into industrial civilization. At least until you run out of
asteroids (or whatever) to process into habitats. Obviously this is
near-eschatological thinking. But it goes way back, at least as far a
J.D. Bernal's seminal essay, "The World, the Flesh and the Devil"

http://www.marxists.org/archive/bern...soul/index.htm

(Yes, at marxists.org. Bernal was a Marxist, and even a fan of the
USSR until the invasion of Hungary. Funny how space colonies could
start conceptually under one utopian ideology, and have similar appeal
at the other end of the ideological spectrum, decades later.)

One interesting question about an O'Neill Habitat: is it a place, or
is it a vehicle?

One could ask the same question about Earth, and some have answered:
"vehicle". If, as it now seems, we have to treat it ever more as a
vehicle, the political maturity (one would hope, anyway) that comes
with that might tell us a lot about how to manage O'Neill Habitats.

I could imagine various social arrangements that _might_ work on an
O'Neill Hab other than dictatorship or strict military regimentation,
but I can't see any way to avoid the necessity for a very strong
executive and a state that can override individual wishes pretty
firmly and quickly. There wouldn't be much margin for error.

I'm not sure the place/vehicle dichotomy is as strong as you might
think. All "places" require some kind of top-down environmental
management; it's just become so routine that we don't think about it
much. If you really think through the challenges of terrorism, you
really start wondering why more infrastructure isn't better protected.

You can achieve a certain degree of modular redundancy by building
space colonies in clusters, so that if one looks like it might
generate refugees, they have a chance of being rescued and
accommodated. Then the main thing you have to worry about is
coordinated terror attacks.

But .. why do we worry about terror attacks? Notwithstanding Rand's
comment about ideological hatred being a basis for continued warfare,
I don't think the motives for terrorism would ever be nearly as strong
in any O'Neillian scenario of ever-expanding space colonization. As
Stephen Pape has argued, in his "Logic of Suicide Terrorism", almost
all suicide bombing seems to stem from claims by nationalist groups on
the territory of liberal democracies. Ideology -- whether Marxist in
the case of the Tamil Tigers or Islamist in the case of Hamas or
Hizbollah -- is perhaps only second-order manifestation of a burning
passion to get your (presumed) turf back. But that's not the O'Neill
(or Bernal) vision, where most economic activity is oriented around
actually creating more new turf, for more new people being born all
the time (and more hypothetical still, where the largest unit of
social organization is something more like a city-state run in an
other-than-liberal-democratic manner). In any such future, I have to
wonder whether the passions that bring people to terroristic slaughter
would have such free rein?

-michael turner

"Damien Valentine" wrote in message
ups.com...
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.

Be careful. What might seem to be a consensus on this newsgroup might not
correspond to a consensus in the professional space community. There are
still experts around willing to make the argument that SPS might become
economical under plausible circumstances. Am I trying to argue that they
are the everwhelming majority or having enormous sway over policy? No. But
they're still out there.

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?

Only one thing. Permanently settling space. But that might just be a
restatement of "for its own sake".

--


Regards,
Mike Combs
----------------------------------------------------------------------
By all that you hold dear on this good Earth
I bid you stand, Men of the West!
Aragorn

"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...

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.

Yes, but what percentage of the total of what you need is the stuff that
absolutely has to come from Earth? For SPS, one study put that at 1%.

--


Regards,
Mike Combs
----------------------------------------------------------------------
By all that you hold dear on this good Earth
I bid you stand, Men of the West!
Aragorn

Eivind Kjorstad schrieb:
Matthias Warkus skreiv:

Uh, yes. All forms of power generation need a distribution grid and
buffer storage of some kind. Your point being?

Solar needs *more* buffer-storage than many (not all) other forms of
power-generation.

Accidentally, that makes it a perfect match for some other types of
power-generation that has huge buffer-stores.

For example we produce 90%+ of our electrical energy with hydro-power
that has water-magazines in the high mountains with capacity measured
literally in *months*. Needs to be so, since rainfall and snowmelt ain't
really adjusted to fit power-consumption.

Solar is a perfect match. You use solar whenever the sun shines, and
whenever it doesn't, you use the cubic kilometres of water stored at
altitude.

That's exactly why the idea of setting Europe up with a high-efficiency
HVDC grid to store solar and wind power in hydro-heavy areas is
seriously being discussed.

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

Rand Simberg schrieb:
On Sat, 06 Oct 2007 08:02:56 +0200, in a place far, far away, Matthias
Warkus made the phosphor on my
monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:

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.

With associated losses.

With modern HVDC links, losses are negligeable, especially since there's
so much solar power to go around.

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

Pat Flannery wrote:

Oh come on! We could have been on the Moon by 1963!

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight...

The other thing people lose sight of when praising the WvB route is
that he sketched it all PRE-Sputnik, when there was no prospect of
funding big enough and long-lasting enough to make it happen.

The same post-Sputnik sense of urgency that opened the budgetary
spigot drove the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo timelines. So in the real world
(as opposed to 20/20 hindsight) there was never a choice between a
sprint and his methodical, step-by-step infrastructure for space
activity in general.

I fully accept the *logic* of "first make access to LEO routine and
robust, then assemble your next-step-outward expeditions out of
rotuine-sized pieces." But I don't see it as a genuinely available
path in 1957-1961.

Eivind Kjorstad wrote:

Erik Max Francis skreiv:
John Schilling wrote:

If you want to skip the fluid mechanics, just tack a factor of one-half
on the "area of hole times density of air times speed of sound" BOTE
calculation.

So what's the full calculation, then?

http://www.sff.net/people/geoffrey.landis/higgins.html

Already mentioned in this thread.

So it has. I skimmed a bit too much there.

--
Erik Max Francis && && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM, Y!M erikmaxfrancis
All men think all men mortal, save themselves.
-- Edmund Young

On Sat, 06 Oct 2007 17:29:32 -0000, 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.

No, it's actually the opposite. Hamsters and hamster wheels are cheap
but useless and unprofitable. Solar power satellites are useful and
profitable, but expensive.

And it's not economically impossible to buy useful, profitable, expensive
things. People do that quite frequently. They just usually aren't in
any rush, and will try the cheaper options first.


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