Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps

The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps by Marshall T.
Savage, 1994

[1] AQUARIUS - Space Colony at Sea
[2] BIFROST - 21st Century Launch System
[3] ASGARD - Space Colony in Orbit
[4] AVALON - Ecospheres on the Moon
[5] ELYSIUM - Terraforming Mars
[6] SOLARIA - Colonizing the Solar System
[7] GALACTICA - Colonizing the Galaxy

The Millennial Project is a thousand year plan to colonize the galaxy. Yes, you
read that right, no need to adjust the sanity controls on your computer.

The Millennial Project begins with the premise that mankind may very well be the
only life in the universe; it is therefore our duty to see that life spreads and
flourishes, that we fill the universe and make it live and breathe. As long as we
are stuck on just one little clump of mud hurtling about the sun, all our eggs
are in one basket. A single large meteor, nuclear war, or virulent plague might
wipe us out. Even barring catastrophe, population density and longevity are
increasing. Eventually we'll have to either stop breeding or find new places to
put people. This book is an eight part, 1,000 year plan to solve these problems.

Marshall T. Savage's elegant and eloquently written plan begins with a simple
step: establishment of a foundation to begin planning for humanity's diaspora.
Since The Millennial Project was written in 1994, this actually has already
begun, though it looks like it's in the early stages.

---------------------------------------

[1] AQUARIUS - Space Colony at Sea

The meat of the plan begins with my favorite step - colonization of the Earth's
seas. Aquarius solves todays problems in an inexpensive and ecologicially sound
way, and serves as a testbed for our later colonization efforts.

The first and most important part of each aquarian colony is an OTEC (Ocean
Thermal Energy Converter), a revolutionary form of solar power. Thanks to the
sun, surface ocean waters are far warmer than in the depths, especially at the
equator. An OTEC is a 3300 foot long pipe that sucks 40 degree (fahrenheit) water
to the surface where it's 80 degrees. This temperature differential can then be
used to power a steam engine. The lower the air pressure is, the lower the
boiling point. At .43 PSI water boils at 80 degrees. The expansion of the water
vapor turns a turbine which generates electricity. The vapor then condences on a
pipe that carries 40 degree water, which then lowers the pressure, which causes
more water to boil, continuing the process.

A single OTEC will be taken by ship to a spot in equatorial waters, where the
water is warm and deep and hurricanes are rare (thanks to the Corriolis force). A
magnesium wire mesh will be placed in the water and using the electricity from
the OTEC the water will be electrolyzed, creating a "seament". The same minerals
used by shellfish to create their shell will be deposited onto the wire from the
sea water due to the electricity. After 6 months of electrolysis a 5.5 mile
diameter structure capable of housing 100,000 people should be complete.

The OTEC will pay many dividends. Excess energy can be converted and stored, or
sold...water can be electrolyzed, separating the oxygen and hydrogen. Hydrogen
can then be transported via large balloons for use in fuel cells in other parts
of the world. More importantly, the water dredged from the depths of the sea will
be rich in nitrogen which will promote plant and algal growth, making sea farming
of fish and mollusks possible.

----------------------------------

[2] BIFROST - 21st Century Launch System

Our bridge into space will be a revolutionary new system, far more economical
than NASA's shuttles. A kilogram of payload onboard a Space Shuttle costs about
$8800 to send into orbit. The reason for this is that for every ton of payload
(the stuff you actually intend to put into orbit) you have to use 25 tons of fuel
and shuttle to get it there (20 tons of fuel, 5 of shuttle). Much of the fuel is
spent, not lifting the payload, but lifting the rest of the fuel.

By contrast, Bifrost will be extremely cheap, perhaps as low as $15 to $20 per
kilogram over the long term. The reason for this is that the Bifrost shuttle will
carry almost none of its own fuel.

Bifrost begins with a 250 kilometer tunnel drilled out of a mountain and the
surrounding countryside. The tunnel will be hyperbolic - beginning with a slight
upward slope until it reaches the mountain towards the end, at which point it
will be nearly vertical. Ideally the mountain will be one situated on or near the
equator such as Kilimanjaro because objects at the equator are already moving
faster than objects located at other parts of the world...the Earth has a
circumference of about 25,000 miles, and rotates every 24 hours, so an object at
the equator has an angular velocity of more than 1,000 miles an hour. By
contrast, an object at the north pole has nearly no angular velocity. This extra
velocity makes launches a bit cheaper (and explains why American launches have
been done from Florida and Texas).

The shuttle is a "wave-rider", a delta wing craft (triangular) that coasts on its
own shockwave and makes an excellent glider. The wave-rider will be accelerated
through the tunnel using superconducting rings in the walls - magnetism will drag
it along until it's attained much of the velocity necessary to launch it into
orbit.

The wave-rider carries only about 4 tons of fuel. Ice, to be precise. When the
wave-rider bursts free of the tunnel, powerful lasers on the ground will vaporize
the ice on the rear of the wave-rider, which will give it the extra boost it
needs to get into space.

The only fuel needed is a small chunk of (non-polluting) ice, so the electricity
needed is rather low.

-------------------------------------

[3] ASGARD - Space Colony in Orbit

Our next stepping stone will be a colony in geosynchronous orbit about the Earth.
Much like Aquarius, Asgard will house about 100,000 people. Also, much like
Aquarius, Asgard will be modular. Aquarius will be composed of many hexagons
joined together to allow for easy expansion and provide stability against
sinking; Asgard will be Aquarius taken to 3 dimensions.

Asgard will be composed of a number of silicon bubbles - balloons, really. A
house or office will be a bubble with a 6.66 meter radius. This bubble will be
surrounded by 12 other bubbles of the same size; these 13 will be held by a large
bubble. This in turn will be another dozen similar large bubbles, and these 13
will then be held by the largest bubble (300 meter radius), the outer wall of the
colony.

Each bubble will be inflated by oxygen at 1/5 the air at sea level. On Earth, air
is about 80% nitrogen, 20% oxygen (with a few other gasses thrown in). Removing
the nitrogen will allow us to have less pressure in our bubbles which will exert
less stress, yet still give us the same "partial pressure" of oxygen for
breathing.

The outermost bubble will actually be a double-bubble - one surrounded by another
slightly larger one. The space between these two bubbles will be filled by a 5
meter thickness of water, which will serve as a shield against radiation and
micro-meters as well as drinking water and a space for farming of algae and other
things to eat. Also, like Aquarius, our power needs will be satisfied by solar
power.

---------------------------------

[4] AVALON - Ecospheres on the Moon

From the orbit about our own planet, we'll jump to the next most convenient
place - the Moon. Despite its barren look, the Moon can easily be made hospitable
for life. It has millions of craters, ranging up to hundreds of kilometers in
diameter. These will be domed over; larger ones will make cities, smaller ones
perhaps just single family homes. All together, the craters cover as much area as
California, Texas, and Montana combined.

About 90% of the elements we need are available right there on the Moon. The
remaining 10% can be rounded up from other places such as meteors. One type of
meter especially, "carbonaceous chondrites," have exactly what we need, including
(of course) carbon, and water.

Once we've established a presence on the Moon, we'll repeat one of the previous
steps: Bifrost. A similar system on the Moon will work tremendously cheaply, both
because the Moon has just 1/6 the gravity of Earth, and because the cooler
temperatures make cooling the superconductors easy. From there we will launch our
way to the next step...

-------------------------------------

[5] ELYSIUM - Terraforming Mars

Our first target won't actually be Mars itself, but its tiny moon Phobos. Phobos
is a 26 kilometer diameter rock circling Mars, barely big enough to call a moon.
One thing in its favor is that, again, with very little gravity it makes an
excellent space station, because launches are cheap. You can actually throw a
stone from Phobos and hit Mars.

Phobos itself isn't nearly large or hospitable enough, so from there we would
head to Mars. Fortunately, all evidence points to Mars once being a world much
like Earth. There are mountains, dry river beds, empty oceans. At the poles there
are frozen reservoirs of carbon dioxide. There may even be vast frozen seas
beneath the surface. It will be our job to melt the polar caps of carbon dioxide
and let the greenhouse effect take over (with a bit of help from us). Amazingly,
Mars has a day that's only 33 minutes longer than Earth's and in fact fits human
circadian rhythms more closely than Earth's, so we should feel right at home,
though sunlight will be a bit less than half as bright as on Earth.

Presumably by this time we will have perfected use of fusion for power
generation. It's fusion that powers the Sun, as well as certain kinds of nuclear
weapons. Helium-3, a rare isotope of helium, can be harvested from the Moon and
can be used together with deuterium (an isotope of Hydrogen very common in
Earth's oceans) to start a fusion reaction.

--------------------------------------

[6] SOLARIA - Colonizing the Solar System

With just a 2% annual growth rate, there will be 1 trillion humans by the year
2250, about 166 people for every 1 person there is today, doubling about every 36
years. With an 8% growth rate typical of frontier settlement, this would be
astronomically higher, doubling every 9 years. Where will we put all these
people?

Our best bet is the asteroid belt, a big pile of rocks orbitting between Mars and
Jupiter. Amazingly, there are ten billion asteroids larger than 100 meters in
diamater. That's larger than a football field in all 3 dimensions, and weighs 1.5
million tons. The 32 largest asteroids are far larger, all over 200 kilometers in
diameter, with Ceres, the largest, being 466 kilometers. Each asteroid, once
hollowed out, could support a population of anywhere from thousands to billions
of people. Beyond that, there are 100 billion asteroids between 10 and 100 meters
in diameter, with enough matter to support anywhere from a few families to a
small town.

Farther out there's an even more incredible resource: the Oort Cloud. The Oort
Cloud is a ring of as many as 100 trillion comets, starting at about Pluto and
extending about halfway to the nearest star. The mass of the comets in the Oort
Cloud may be as high as ten times the combined mass of all of the planets in the
solar system.

At this stage we'll want to increase our energy output to fuel our expansion.
Again, we'll turn to solar power. In fact, it will be the ultimate in solar
power - what is known as a Dyson shell (or Dyson sphere), named after the
physicist Freeman Dyson who first came up with the idea in 1959. A Dyson shell is
a 20.6 million kilometer diameter shell almost completely surrounding the sun,
leaving a narrow band in the center so that light will still reach the Earth and
other planets. The shell will be composed of an incredible number of thin solar
collectors that will beam energy in the form of lasers or focussed microwaves to
where it is needed.

----------------------------------------

[7] GALACTICA - Colonizing the Galaxy

Despite an exhaustive search by programs such as SETI and SETI@Home, no other
star system has been proven to have life. It's in this step that we'll change
that.

Our first star system for settlement will be the Centauri system, a system with
three stars orbitting each other, Alpha Centauri, Beta Centauri, and Proxima
Centauri. The closest is about 4.3 light years away.

A light year doesn't sound like much; science fiction flippantly throws the term
around as if it's trivial, but really it's such an inconceivably large unit that
travelling this distance in a reasonable amount of time will prove quite a
challenge. A light year is the distance light travels in a year; light travels
nearly 300,000 kilometers per second, or around the Earth twelve times in one
second. Clearly we'll need a new form of energy and propulsion to reach the
nearest star.

The answer is anti-matter. Anti-matter is very much like matter, except when
combined with matter, both are annihilated and release pure energy. A kilogram of
anti-matter is enough to launch 9,000 Saturn V rockets to the moon.

Naturally you don't find anti-matter just lying around. We'll have to produce it,
at incredible cost. We'll create electron / positron pairs by focussing together
lasers operating at about 26 million times the power of the Sun, but fortunately
for only billionths of a second at a time.

We'll need special craft to take us to the Centauri system. Our ship will be
designed to travel at about half the speed of light, which means it will take
more than a decade to get to the nearest star (since it will take time to
accelerate half the speed of light). Travelling at this speed, even the smallest
motes of dust can have incredible destructive force when they collide with the
ship. Therefore, the ship will have a thick ablative shield in the tip, a barrier
that will be expected to wear away over the course of the trip.

http://www.4literature.net/story/2002/7/28/115247/145

Forgot what step 8 was, dam, there goes the galaxy!