The idea feels out of date because optimism about the future is out of date. More people are willing to believe that humanity should go extinct than believe that humanity should colonize space. The author’s foil for Gerard O’Neill is none other than Rachel Carson, whose advocacy against pesticides has directly led to countless human deaths from otherwise-preventable diseases like malaria. Instead of someone like O’Neill who tries to figure out how humanity can grow and flourish throughout the solar system, our hero is the savior of the mosquito.
What a completely bizarre opinion on Rachel Carson. How many deaths did she prevent by pointing out the health drawbacks of spraying the world in DDT and other non-specific chemicals dangerous to life?
>A review article in The Lancet states, "research has shown that exposure to DDT at amounts that would be needed in malaria control might cause preterm birth and early weaning ... toxicological evidence shows endocrine-disrupting properties; human data also indicate possible disruption in semen quality, menstruation, gestational length, and duration of lactation."[38]
>Other studies document decreases in semen quality among men with high exposures (generally from IRS).[88]
>Studies are inconsistent on whether high blood DDT or DDE levels increase time to pregnancy.[65] In mothers with high DDE blood serum levels, daughters may have up to a 32% increase in the probability of conceiving, but increased DDT levels have been associated with a 16% decrease in one study.[89]
>Indirect exposure of mothers through workers directly in contact with DDT is associated with an increase in spontaneous abortions[87]
>Other studies found that DDT or DDE interfere with proper thyroid function in pregnancy and childhood.[65][90]
Mothers with high levels of DDT circulating in their blood during pregnancy were found to be more likely to give birth to children who would go on to develop autism.[91][92]
There are other less toxic alternatives to DDT for mosquito control and Rachel Carson helped open our eyes to the fact that they are needed.
The slur against Carson is a myth that got started in the last couple of decades by anti-regulatory think tanks as a way to attack one of the foundations of the modern environmental movement. It's complete nonsense because 1) DDT spraying is still considered a legitimate method of mosquito (i.e. malaria) control, which was never the main problem anyway - widespread agricultural use was what led to "Silent Spring", and 2) DDT resistance eventually limited its effectiveness even for mosquito control. Read "Merchants of Doubt" if you want the gory details.
The Nixon admin banned DDT in 1972. Just in the USA.
Somehow, this got translated into; 'Carson got DDT banned and all malaria deaths are her fault'. This is despite the fact that where there are mosquitos we are still using DDT.
It's the same logic as "If we don't use antibiotics in cattle they'll all die!". Totally ignoring the unintended consequences of antibiotic resistance in humans.
The funny/stupid/ironic thing is, the reasons people think humanity should just "go extinct" are all the reasons we should move to space instead. There's no story of "ecosystem damage" where there is no ecosystem in the first place.
Though based on my experiences on HN, even some people here need this really bashed into their heads, that we can't hurt ecosystems that don't exist. ("What if some do?" Then by all means worry about them, but by resources, they are a fraction of a fraction of a percent of what the universe has.) There is a major unexamined assumption that people have that life exists everywhere, and therefore we can't put a toe outside our planet without stomping on something, simply because that's our Earth-based experience. Once brought to the conscious level it's obvious that it's false, but it's hard to get it up to that level for some people.
Yeah, the great thing about an O'Neill Cylinder is that the sooner people can move there, the sooner they can leave the Earth well enough alone. (Although in reality, I think the real challenge is going to be responsible stewardship of the Earth, not just "leaving it alone". Even the Amazon rainforest is likely an artifact of human culture.)
vastly underestimating the resources required to lift each kilogram into orbit, let alone the development cycle to get there. and shall we start all this now here on earth just adding to the plight I outlined just before?
again, no sense of proportion of the actual issue here. we are DESTROYING the earth, not mildly scratching it etc.
establishing a space society is a hugely intensive operation that dwarfs the hundreds of millions required to put a few folks and some trinkets into a space station etc.
"we are DESTROYING the earth, not mildly scratching it etc."
Only for very, very particular definitions of "Earth". There are numerous events in Earth's past that by any objective standard are more destructive than even the worst possible interpretations of man's efforts to date and worst plausible projections of man's efforts in the future. To pick one that probably doesn't even come to your mind, nothing we've done is even within two factors of magnitude of the disaster of the Great Oxygenation Crisis. Probably three, maybe even four. That one was bad. Well, bad at the time, anyhow; certainly none of us would today prefer that it had never happened.
That we're doing various dangerous and bad things is undeniable. That we're "DESTROYING" the Earth is a memetic weapon that has been crafted and fired at you by people who want you to give them lots of power to fix the DESTRUCTION of Earth, and to ensure that you stay in their control by ensure that anyone who disagrees with that assessment has the human instinctual "religious heretic" template applied to them, so you don't apply rational thought. Things are bad, but not so bad that you need that much despair.
That said, I don't expect us to lift industry into space. I expect us to lift an industrial seed into space that grows there, and that ultimately not all that many people will necessarily leave Earth.
I also expect that the current situation will not persist indefinitely. If we have clean energy, and look at how that is developing lately, lifting things into space isn't necessarily that big a deal. A "environmentally neutral" launch platform isn't even remotely inconceivable; it's not terribly out of reach today. The question isn't about the technology of 2019; the question is about the technology of 2069.
What is astounding to me, both in O'Neills plan and Bezos offerings (and Silicon Valley Solutions in general, LOL)
is the level of social and historical ignorance on display, as if we don't currently contend for control of resources, as if we are currently managing anything responsibly, and as if the political and social implications of such a project are occurring in the literal vacuum of space, rather than in the highly politically charged landscape of human endeavors.
These folks appear to avoid current events like the plague. Jeff Bezos is still highly involved in assisting the US government and it's various military and intelligence entities in seeking advantage versus other nations.
Taking nationalist ignorant policies and mentalities with us into space seems... retrograde, stupid, and doomed to failure. Inelegant.
There is a reason that all seriously futuristic sci-fi puts us WELL beyond this petty nationalist nonsense currently causing people to re-re-visit the 1980's yet again...
Even given lunar materials etc, if we are incapable of altering our current industrial trajectory from the top down (lack of political will), what on earth makes one think we could direct any space activities from the top down?
It's currently sufficient for human leadership to favor selfish and group-harming goals, and there is no indication that this would change in orbit, lol
One currently sees the opposite of top-down coordination of space activities, after an initial cold-war-inspired display of bravado etc.
(private ventures contracted to life public sector payloads into orbit) and you can be assured that plenty of both consumption of earths resources and pollution of earths atmosphere and water occur as byproducts.
Private enterprise would seem to offer a "willy nilly" approach to anything, as such.
> Even given lunar materials etc, if we are incapable of altering our current industrial trajectory from the top down (lack of political will), what on earth makes one think we could direct any space activities from the top down?
I don't think the lack of a dictator--especially the sort of dictator you would support--is one of our problems!
>There's no story of "ecosystem damage" where there is no ecosystem in the first place.
There's also no story of humanity where there is no ecosystem in the first place.
I think the hazard isn't in stomping on an exo-Earth ecosystem.
I think it's that if we can't avoid damage to multi-billion year evolved, robust ecosystems on our home planet, we might not successfully craft off-planet ecosystems that will sustain us indefinitely.
>we might not successfully craft off-planet ecosystems that will sustain us indefinitely.
Not on the first go. So we should start early.
I think that learning how to craft off-planet ecosystems is a large part of what is going to help us stem damage down here. Where would solar power be now without the early adopters in the space industry?
"I think it's that if we can't avoid damage to multi-billion year evolved, robust ecosystems on our home planet, we might not successfully craft off-planet ecosystems that will sustain us indefinitely."
And so...?
Even if true, that doesn't lead anywhere. If you're trying to faintly imply we shouldn't try, you ought to bring the arguments up to the surface, where examination will quite likely show they don't have that much substance.
Even Earth's ecosystem is as much "crafted" by human hands as it is "natural" in the first place, and that's been the case for millennia. It's not merely a question of "avoiding damage". It's a question of how we deliberately choose to craft the Earth's ecosystem in the future.
Just because the natural system has tolerated meddling and abuse does not amount to crafting. In fact the exercises of trying to create an artificial system failed miserably... and will likely again. And that's a great reason to try to go to space, to learn about how incompetent we are with our tech despite being full of ourselves by taking all the things provided freely by the earth for us to abuse and exploit while giving back virtually nothing. I mean humans often don't bury their dead naturally they burn them or embalm them... we give back nothing, we take everything: THIS IS SPARTA!
The “natural system” has tolerated millennia of “meddling and abuse”, and that “meddling and abuse” has largely served to make the ecosystem more habitable to humanity. We don’t even know what an un-“meddled” nature would even be like. Even the Amazon rainforest is in large part a product of human cultivation starting 11,000 years ago. The transformation of aurochs from a wild megafauna to a technology to transform inedible grass into edible milk and beef is also over 10,000 years old. The artificial evolution of our hunting and working companion, the dog, is millennia older still.
It's telling a millennia is 1,000 years. 10,000 years is a blink of an eye. The dinosaurs were around for over 160 million years, that is sixteen thousand times longer -- talk about a millennia. More habitable for humanity, deadly for pretty much every other living thing. Heck we were even doing all that much until 300 year ago -- that's 160 million divided by 533,333. So let's see the damage we did in 300 years multiplied by 533,333 times, yeah we're going the way of the dinosaurs almost half a million times faster than the dinosaurs.
We need maybe like 100 million or less people total on the planet. And 7 or 70 or heck 700 billion littered through the rest of the solar system. The chances of the survival of our species and life in general on the planet the would be infinitely greater than what we have done in the past 300 years. Population growth outside the planet raises absolutely no questions about the survival of the planet or species. The rest of the solar system is already completely and utterly dead as far as we know. No arguments about pollution or stability or sustainability or survival apply to it.
The rest of the universe as far as we know is our canvas, but please spare the damn planet from where we came. It's rare and nearly impossible to replace.
"tolerated"
nothing like we've thrown at it in exponentially increasing form every year since 1900...
and by all accounts it's not "tolerating" it very well at the moment.
Fisheries? Sea water contamination? Air pollution? Groundwater contamination (fracking? agricultural runoff?)
Rainforest loss (The Amazon! how many hectares lost per day? Palm oil plantations supplanting Indonesian rainforest, etc...)
all on top of human caused climate change...
1) We have been around less than 1 million years. Our industrial revolution began less than 300 years ago.
We constitute 0.01% of earths biomass, yet have destroyed 83% of wild mammalian life https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506
We have polluted the oceans to the extent that plastic bags and radioactive fallout from WW2 can be found in the bottom of the Marianas trench.
We are in a mad rush to burn the accumulated carbon reserves from millions of years inside of a span of decades.
We are currently on a trajector to turn this planet into a place inhospitable to most life forms, including ourselves.
https://xkcd.com/1732/
Last year was the highest carbon-output year on record, just as the year before was, and the year before that one.
We are utterly destroying the only known home to life forms in the universe. We are doing it rapidly.
You seem to be living in a delusional parallel reality in which establishing a space society doesn't consume the resources of our ONLY current home planet and doesn't pollute it.
We must change our ideologies, our thought patterns, our cultures, and our entire industrial societies patterns and habits (not to mention energy source) within the next decades to survive, let alone thrive or develop further.
I don't get the sense that you comprehend our actual condition on this planet. There is a very very steep footprint curve with regards to both our population (There was roughly 1.5 billion of us the last time we all tried to kill each other, World War 2. Now there are 7 billion of us. Before, the consumption footprint of a person was rather low, now each person consumes more resources than ever before, and this amount of consumption continues to rise. The Chinese middle class will surely want every accessory their American counterparts have, right?)
How has this entire predicament avoided your scrutiny until now?
I'm not denying that problems exist. But I'm also not going to resort to pessimistic doomsaying about them, either. Most of the problems you mention are already being solved.
If anyone's living in a delusional parallel reality, it's you and your apocalyptic rantings.
Actually talking about the Amazon as a great feat of human stewardship is perfect. Humans are capable of making nature better, but I sense one major caveat: when you name the Amazon as a human endeavor you forget that all the species that make the Amazon such a biodiverse place were already there. Humans might have made the Amazon a better place, but alle the ingrediënts were already there. The timescale of humans transforming earth is mindbogglingly short in terms of the timescale of "nature". Nowadays we are destroying species by the millions (not millions of individuals of a species, but millions of species!) This destroys the possibility to create a better system because the capital for creating one is destroyed.
Kenneth Ewart Boulding would like to have a word with you...
On an orbital colony, there are life maintaining systems and it's probable that people will have different ideas how much they would require maintenance.
Likewise, there will be limited resources and probably again people will have different ideas on what to spend on the short term. Ie a kid would like ice cream but the parents know they could starve before the next harvest so better to spend that energy on some more efficient food.
> There is a major unexamined assumption that people have that life exists everywhere, and therefore we can't put a toe outside our planet without stomping on something, simply because that's our Earth-based experience. Once brought to the conscious level it's obvious that it's false, but it's hard to get it up to that level for some people.
I think it is likely (20% or greater) we will compete for resources against non-terrestrial lifeforms before humans leave the solar system, assuming we leave the solar system.
Earth doesn't contain the majority of all water in the solar system. Earth might not even contain all of the liquid water in the solar system. What are the chances that liquid water exists in Ceres' core, or under the icey surface of Europa or Ganymede or another moon? What are the chances that Martian ice, or Europa ice, or Saturn's ice have microbes frozen in them, possibly able to thaw given better environmental conditions? We might even find life in places without water, such as Titan's methane lakes. Titan has a methane cycle very similar to Earth's water cycle. Methane makes a great rocket fuel. Water makes great rocket fuel and is necessary to life support systems.
We have a history of taking what we want without regards to the consequences or whom it hurts. If we don't compete with other life when we leave Earth it's because other life isn't out there, not because of our strong morale core.
"I think it is likely (20% or greater) we will compete for resources against non-terrestrial lifeforms before humans leave the solar system, assuming we leave the solar system."
If you want to believe that, fine, but be aware you're believing despite a complete lack of evidence. There's little more than a faint trace of a sign of any life in the rest of the solar system (a few stray whiffs of methane on Mars that aren't that hard to explain geologically), and absolutely no sign of any sort of life that would provide any sort of competition if we decided we wanted their resources.
I don't mean that it would be a fair competition. I meant competition in the same way we compete for fresh water with plants. If there isn't enough to go around we always drink first. My 20% is entirely based on what I think the odds are that single cell microbes exist, possibly in a dormant state, somewhere near a water or methane source in our solar system.
We'll probably (50% or greater chance) want all the water we can get our hands on. Water makes great rocket fuel and is a critical component of life support systems. Water, having mass, tends to collect in gravity wells.
There's a massive practical difference between Ceres size gravity wells that can be escaped with a half-decent cannon and ones that can't. And I've never heard of people suggesting there might be life on/in Ceres.
Oort Cloud objects as in [0]? Getting to asteroids takes way to long already. Yeah, Oort cloud won't happen unless we have a magical breakthrough in propulsion as depicted in The Expanse. And at that point current intuition around gravity wells will probably not apply anymore as well.
I firmly believe in space colonization, but I also firmly believe in realizing things, not just pushing propaganda or fantasy (sometimes with ulterior motives). O'Neill cylinders as a panacea are just that, as far as I can tell (I admit I haven't seen any objective analysis on it; my total guess calculation would put it at say $20M/person absolute minimum for a large city of say 1M persons -- which would be several times the US economy or the assets of a large number of most valuable companies combined).
We just can't not fix Earth. There's no alternative. I've studied quite a bit about Mars colonization (and have my own thoughts about colonizing other places -- in particular I find underground habitats in Mercury intriguing), and it is quite clearly a project for the end of the century at least. Even when the soil, the gravity, and the materials are all more or less at your disposal, it's still extremely difficult to kick start a quasi-self-sustaining manufacturing base, even less one capable of producing exports and growing rapidly. The cost constants per inhabitant are very high.
Like anyone else, I think we need to move off this planet as soon as feasible. But we need a real vision, and we need to do it in a way that makes us truly more resillient and further reaching -- that is, we need colonies to be self-sustaining to the point of surviving catastrophe on other colonies without themselves disappearing -- this is the truly worthwhile goal I believe we need to pursue.
Imaginary space cities relying thousands of billionaires / millions of millionaires spending all wealth on are not that.
Heck, I even believe in Interstellar colonization in the not-too-distant future.
See also, other strategies for ensuring human survival:
"The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles...hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages...And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet...the planet...the planet isn't going anywhere. WE ARE!"
Every species has the biological imperative. Each species has the right to compete with all other species for environmental resources with all of their evolutionary advantages in order to survive.
It isn't humanity's fault that it can expand into and create its own environment suitable for propagating into. We shouldn't allow ourselves to perish into extinction if we have any other option. There is no more moral grounds for the intentional mass-murder of the human species than there is for the intentional destruction of any other species.
If people have tried humanity and are actually advocating its demise, I'd have to ask upon what grounds humanity had been found more wanting than plants or any other species known to have caused mass extinctions throughout known history. If humanity deserves to die, I think we should offer to allow the most ardent of species mass-suicide to go first.
Getting resources from the moon seems out-of-date these days because the moon is far away in terms of energy even if it is close in distance. Getting resources from asteroids makes more sense.
As for Reagan and Thatcher I don't see either one as oriented toward growth, but rather oriented towards a "war against inflation" that involved higher interest rates, austerity, and tolerance for a lower rate of GDP growth so long as the pain was felt by the middle and below. Reagan might have had sharper rhetoric against environmentalism, but the movement did not collapse until the Clinton years.
When I've been envisioning space colonies lately it has been really large structures; I am fascinated by the idea that you can build a "small ringworld" where the rotation holds in the air with a scale size of a megameter or so, particularly if you can keep the upper atmosphere cold.
The rotation speeds of such a thing are close to orbital velocity and the material requirements are similar to that of a space elevator... Unless you can construct an orbital-velocity bearing in which case you can build a belt around it to reinforce it.
Even then it is hard to build room for any vertical relief into the budget, no high mountains, no deep oceans, probably you get a rather uncomfortable hydrological cycle.
It would probably look different from one of those O'Neil colonies since you'd have a very blue sky and most of the things that look different from a planet would be far away and would look small. A lot depends on if the z-axis of the colony is long or short.
> Getting resources from the moon seems out-of-date these days because the moon is far away in terms of energy even if it is close in distance. Getting resources from asteroids makes more sense.
You're right about raw energy, but one advantage of the moon is that you can build electromagnetic mass drivers that can sling raw material into orbit without affecting the natural orbit of the body (technically you are but only negligibly). For asteroids, you probably have to haul the whole thing back into Earth orbit for it to be useful, and you'd probably have to use some kind of propellant.
Also asteroid missions have much longer timelines if you have to go all the way out to the belt to get them. Less so if you get a near-earth rock, but those missions are pretty complex if trying it in Kerbal Space Program is any indication, and getting it wrong can be catastrophic. Many countries might not take too kindly to people wanting to sling city-destroying rocks around. Moon seems safer in that sense as a first option.
The two aren't mutually exclusive of course, and there are advantages to both. I imagine we'll see both strategies employed in a variety of different ways.
Still, moon has some gravity, making it possible to use some terestrial mining techniques and hardware and has more or less unlimited energy once you have a self-sustaining solar panel plant going.
The general idea for ONeil cylinders has been to build them in Moon-Earth Lagrange points with lunar material launched by solar powered electromagnetic mass drivers.
The L4 and L5 Lagrange points that O'Neill advocated in the 1970s really make no sense.
Halo orbits around Moon-Earth and Sun-Earth L1 and L2 make a lot more sense because they are energetically cheap to get to. L4 and L5 are a ghetto.
Tech like the mass drivers can move material from the asteroid belts in more cheaply than it can from the lunar surface. You also have to consider what it costs to stop the projectiles when they get where they are going (one reason to use the Earth-Moon L1 because you can hit it with nearly no excess velocity)
Ringworlds and orbitals are significantly bigger and harder to build than O’Neill cylinders. O’Neill cylinders are potentially feasible within a century or two; ringworlds and orbitals would take much longer.
>O’Neill cylinders are potentially feasible within a century or two
Is there anything fundamentally holding us back from building one right now? I mean there's the obvious problem that nobody has a good reason to build one, and only a hand full of entities have the funding to do so. But the engineering challenges seem to be on the level of building LHC or ITER: not nessesarily easy, but very doable.
SpaceX is claiming in the neighborhood of $1500/kg to put something into LEO. If you want to put a structure on the order of billions of kilograms into orbit it would make more sense to get that mass from something already out there and park it in high orbit instead - and space-based mining technology doesn't exist yet.
At the same time a fully loaded Falcon 9 uses about $10/kg of fuel to put something into LEO. The cost mainly comes from building the rockets, and to a lesser degree operating them (mission control, landing ships, etc). All of those costs would come down dramatically once you reach the scales nessesary for building such a structure. Economies of scale could easily bring the price down an order of magnitude or more.
For a small-ish cylinder that might be enough. For a cylinder that's multiple kilometers long we would want to do asteroid mining and rockets engineered to bring stuff up cheaply (at the expense of loosing a few rockets, loosing dirt is a lot more acceptable than loosing billion dollar satellites).
I wonder if we could circularize the orbit of a near earth asteroid like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3908_Nyx which is outside of earth orbit always (less likely to run into the earth, and 10% farther up the sun's gravity well.
And something like $300 per kg for Starship (on the assumption of roughly $30M for a fully reusable launch - Musk says it should be cheaper than F9 per launch - and 100 tonnes to LEO) if they're successful in minimizing refurbishment between launches, and there's enough business to spread the development costs over enough launches.
They're enormous, and enormous things are difficult and expensive to build. They're also in space, and building things in space is difficult and expensive. So that's quadratically difficult and expensive.
Space is really big, though. If you're in the asteroid belt, it doesn't really help if the Space Coast Guard is also in the asteroid belt because they might still be multiple AU's away.
Consider that the delta V from Mars to Earth is 15 km/s, and we use gravity boost to make that delta V.
Assume we invented engines that could manage that delta V in half an hour. If my math is right, if you wanted enough 'fire departments' to reach every asteroid within one hour, you'd need about 67,000 of them, and you'd have to figure out how to pull that delta V without running into any other asteroids (probably out of the ecliptic?)
The good news is your paramedics would only pull about .8Gs which, while perfectly comfortable for earthers would still be tolerable for belters. My point is that if you try to decrease the number of stations to, say, 100, you're going to turn any human occupants into a fine mist in the process.
Did you look at any of my math at all? 1/67000 is a pretty tiny fraction alright.
Ok, here’s some more math. The average distance between asteroids in the belt is apparently over twice as far as the moon. The moon is still very far away for us. There will be no rescues for a very long time and remember that humans die at 10Gs, so when I say very long time I’m not just talking about faster rockets. I’m talking about basic research in human physiology.
More NASA videos and The Expanse for you, less Star Trek.
This is not exactly true. Arguably, it's half false. In any case, this is more nuanced than what you state. There may be some humans who die at 10G. Prolonged exposure to high G might increase the death toll. People could be maintained at 10G unconscious, if they are in the right position, on the right kind of couch.
I was about to argue with you and then realized I misspoke. Humans begin to die at 10Gs, as in survivability starts to drop at that point and if the point is to get the humans there and back again, that’s not very good.
Regardless, if people can survive 20Gs that still only doubles your range. And since we are discussing a category error of orders of magnitude, my point still stands.
That's true, but in all likelihood companies will cluster their operations together for this very reason. It's worth sharing some kind of common infrastructure in a specific location to protect workers/assets.
Besides, a few days/weeks is a better response time than a few months.
Sure, but then you need at least two central points for the Space Coast Guard to operate from: Earth itself (inevitably) and whichever "cluster" in the asteroid belt you want.
And there's really a limited size of an asteroid belt cluster you could get. If you start from Ceres and go a few hundred (even dozen!) meters either towards or away from the sun to reach another nearby asteroid, that asteroid has a completely different orbital velocity and will not line up with Ceres again until either it or Ceres completes another full revolution. That means you have to be in essentially the same orbit and travel either clockwise or counterclockwise, which is most efficiently done by making a more eccentric orbit (so your aphelion is the same as Ceres' but your perihelion is lower, or alternatively your perihelion is the same as Ceres' but your aphelion is higher) and then readjusting once you reach the target. But even this maneuver requires going the long way around the sun. Similarly if you want to go up or down relative to your orbital plane (i.e. change inclination).
If you want a cluster of bodies in space that stays relatively the same distance from each other, you have to have a smallish orbital system. The Earth/Moon system is one of these, and it's going to be a lot more feasible to capture near-Earth asteroids and stash them in Earth orbit than to try and find a meaningful cluster of belt asteroids that actually stay close together over the long term.
Looking at these huge open spaces, I can't help but wonder what would happen after a single crack from oncoming debris. To avoid failing all at once a space habitat should be divided into a bunch of smaller sub-compartments -- like the Titanic!
Something that is sometimes pointed out about holes in spacecraft is that you don't lose air as fast as movies would imply. After all, the pressure difference between inside and outside is only 1 atmosphere.
For instance, if a micro-meteor created a bullet-sized hole in the International Space Station, it would take 5-10 minutes for the air pressure to drop to 0.5 atmospheres. The kilometers-scale space colonies described here would take much longer. More than enough time for some drone to patch it, or for the inhabitants to get to "life boats" or some sort of shelter.
I think the important part, then, would be to design the shell such that damage in one part can't spread too far.
Exactly - these thing as designed by ONeil are HUGE - 30 km long on the "default" island three type.
The solid walls would be meters thick, so the projectile would have to be very masive and/or very fast. And even then it would take a long time for pressure to reach dangerously low levels.
I would expect lots of double and triple hulls. Especially on the glassy parts. Micrometorite smashes through a pane and it only opens up the compartmentalized space between the walls. It doesn't even depressurize anything because the secondary hull can be left unpressurized. These can then be repaired by technicians.
A big emergency plug can be designed for large impacts, and as a last resort everybody can be trained in the use of emergency depressurization shelters. It's not without its risks, but at the same time it's not like the Earth is totally safe either. O'Neill colonies don't have to worry about natural disasters.
You cold definitely do a Whipple shield - basically a stand-of plate that vaporizws and fractures any projectiles, making it impact the next plate/hull on much bigger area but with much less localized force. This is basically the main defense ISS has agains micro meteorites and orbital debris.
I think we’re probably a century away from actually finishing an O’Neill Cylinder. Bezos was taking a strikingly long-term view—-he was discussing the transition from a Kardashev I to Kardashev II civilization. We haven’t even reached Kardashev I yet.
Looking at these huge open spaces, I can't help but wonder what would happen after a single crack from oncoming debris.
Some more modern rotating habitat designs have a solid, stationary radiation shield with no breaks or holes. Light is instead provided by LEDs and solar panels. Many of these designs are modular, so have sub compartments.
Well, you could definitely do an ONeil island 3 without the windows and youbwould get twice as much habitable area as a result. The Rama craft from the Encounter with Rama trilogy is basically that.
Here’s the thing: it is probably possible, given enough investment, to get a self sustaining civilization in space started. But it wouldn’t necessarily help the people still on earth very much.
Take any island nation: Iceland for example. They have a small population so they can’t make everything they need; they import lumber, cars, food, etc. And they always have, right from day 1 that the island was settled.
In space however the cost of constantly lifting goods from earth is too high to do that forever. So they have to be totally self sufficient. That means manufacturing, energy, extraction of minerals from asteroids, everything has to be in place. I’d say minimum 10 million population before they can assemble the diversity of industries to do that.
Once they are at that point though, what are they going to trade with earth? Any minerals they obtain will be better used in space then parachuting them down to the surface for processing. So they wouldn’t need us at all. So it’s possible but politically very difficult to justify.
Oh, and I forgot the obvious danger: any people in space always have the “high ground” militarily since they can drop a rock on us whenever they want. So we’ll be in no position to make demands either.
My first though is who would populate these cities. Secular society does not seem capable of reproducing at above replacement rate and global population is expected to peak and start declining this century. Would people start having more children again if housing was plentiful?
It has been decades since I read the High Frontier, but as I recall on of the ideas was that the stations were initially there (in simplified form) to allow for Orbital Power Satellites to be deployed and serviced.
It would be nice if we could deploy such, assuming we manage to avoid them being used as microwave weapons.
Bezos is in PR and sales pitch mode for his sight-seeing trips. Watching a launch involves listening to an endless marketing and sales pitch from that woman who speaks like she's going to hock a loogie.
I thought the whole presentation was pretty cool. Those colonies are just visions of what might be built by future generations. He has new ideas about the future of industry and that's exciting. But I have a hard time seeing the scales he's talking about. Those colonies would not be able to hold billions of people. I'm not sure if moving industry off of Earth, especially for environmental reasons, makes a lot of sense. But when people imagine the future as being exactly like the present it's just tiring and stupid. I don't think he was acting like he knew all the answers but he's moving forward.
> But I have a hard time seeing the scales he's talking about. Those colonies would not be able to hold billions of people.
It entirely depends on how many of them you build. You could also achieve much higher densities than Earth with no real loss of quality of life, since you wouldn't necessarily build massive oceans or deserts or mountains. (Though I would really love to live on an O'Neill cylinder that was laid out as an archipelago!)
The whole presentation is made to emotionally engage an audience of one. One nostalgic non-reader who cares fuck-all about science but who probably remembers those 70's vintage color plates and is all about big ego-driven projects - i.e. Mr. Space Force.
I don't believe for a second that Bezos thinks significant numbers of people living in floating habitats is happening any time soon if ever, but I do think he wants a bite at a contract to go to the moon, and everything about this media push down to the 2024 timeline (call me, mr president) is about pushing those buttons in one particular man's lizard brain.
Could you please stop creating accounts for each few comments you post? That's against the site guidelines, and we ban accounts that do it. HN is a community, and it's important for community that users have an identity that others can relate to.
Also, this comment is much too much of a flamewar rant to be a good comment for HN. If you have a substantive point, please make it without stooping to that.
As a society, we can allocate resources to both of these problems in order to ensure the longevity of the human species. This kind of defeatist attitude is what's holding us back.
Even technologies that are not direct spinoffs often benefit greatly. For example the Apollo onboard computers created demand for smaller computers, accelerating development of integrated circuits and dropping their price. Some credit Apollo with singlehandedly dropping IC prices from $1000 to $20 [1]. If it wasn't for Apollo we likely wouldn't be on this forum.
Just watch Prometheus. This is the same hubris and greed, even if well intentioned.
As the other commentator said, they are too fragile to serve as humanity’s “back-up”. As theme parks or transit vessels, sure. But not as our back-up.
Second, and in my humble opinion more importantly, these will tend to be built and owned by entities and thus everyone in them will be serfs. I honestly can’t say that a similar scenario wouldn’t play out for a planet, claimed as owned by the first flag planted. But, when the structure is wholly built and owned by a profit driven entity such as Amazon... Perhaps they can be owned by consortiums or non for profit entities, there is still issue #1.
Finally. Why build one of these (gravity levels or for transit, I guess being the valid reason I can see, but maybe there is a planet-based solution for the gravity issue, idk) instead of utilizing the planets that are already right there for the using??? And instead of using all the resources to build a habitat, build something else.
Bezos addresses your final question in the presentation. The livable planetary surfaces other than earth (Moon, Mars, maybe Ganymede or something) aren't that big. In total they sum up to somewhere in the realm of Earth's land surface. So inhabiting them is "only" going to enable doubling the human capacity. Whereas space itself will increase human capacity by many orders of magnitude.
These statements are always fantastical. When we talk about humanity exceeding Earth's resource footprint, the issue isn't land in itself. All of our immediate issues come from balancing:
a) How do we harvest energy
b) How much non-human components do we want to leave, and in what configuration, given that significant non-human components are currently required to give us a livable environment
c) How do we distribute resources
Yes ultimately all of those are constrained by land area, but we have so many other things to solve first before land area is THE problem. And hilariously, it's more or less the same problems we need to solve before we need to colonize anything. How do we efficiently (measured in materials, surface area, maintenance, capital, operating cost) collect energy. How do we create and maintain true closed systems that are reasonably conducive to non-shitty human lives. How do we spread the wealth so we don't burn it all down.
Bezos brings land area into it because assuming a 3% growth in energy usage per year, as has been the historical trend, we will need to cover the earth in solar panels in 200 years.
Something he doesn’t touch on is fission/fusion instead of solar, so I am curious about how that changes the calculus.
3% energy growth is unsustainable in the long run; at that rate we are about 1000 years from using more energy per year than the sun emits in totality:
2015 energy usage 110PWh for the entire year[1]
That works out to ~1.8e13 W average power.
Total output for the sun is about 4e26 W[2]
This works out to about 44 doublings, and 3% growth is a doubling every 24 years which means we need to surpass Kardashev II in 1000 years.
I recognized that as well, but then I realized that "covering the earth in solar panels" is pretty much a dumbed-down description of Type I on the Kardashev scale, which we would eventually, inevitably reach regardless of how we generate power.
Why not make the underground habitats on Earth? If you're going to live underground in a fully self-contained ecosystem why bother traveling to a distant planet?
Or on the surface. The oceans are really big and there's a lot of the surface that has basically nothing going on.
Of course this highlights the problem with all of these habitat ideas: They are placed in locations with limited or no easily accessible natural resources, so their options for sustaining themselves are limited. Obviously you need some farmers and janitors and techs to keep everything running, but beyond that what are they going to do? Building stuff is kind of out of the question because you have to ship in all of the raw materials. So your industry needs to be virtual. Coding, finance, etc... But the world only needs so much of that, and if you keep building colonies you're going to saturate the virtual markets while driving insane demand in the physical markets. The economics are hard to reconcile.
I’m willing to wager that by the time we are concerned about finding homes for another full earth load of humans we will be spreading out far beyond just the Moon and Mars. And, as part of an effort to “back-up” humanity that is a good thing. We should be on many, many planets and in many solar systems.
To that point. If one of these habitats is built the first ones should serve as transit vessels to nearby systems, with the final destination of its crew being a planet.
Additionally, let’s take Bezo’s own logic a step further. When gravity levels are less than that of Earth, say, on the Moon, we we’ll be able to build much higher with greater economy. And we will be able to build into the Moon with greater economy as it is 60% the density of Earth. This effectively increases the livable area, if we are to count “engineered surface area”. The same is true of other planetary and Moon surfaces in our solar system.
You once again are left justifying the effort of building the habitat instead of extending the pre existing available planetary foundation
Fair enough. Watch the news. We can’t engineer complex systems without loads of issues. iPhone. The shuttle. Tax code. So, what makes you think we’re gonna nail it when we build one of these???
IMO we do ourselves a disservice by thinking of space colonization as a "back-up". A better way of thinking about it would be that a civilization that can build these habitats, or terraform another planet, also has the technology and resources to fix environmental issues back home. These are of course not short-term goals - I'd consider a 500-year timeline for habitats like the ones pictured above optimistic. But I'd much rather we start now rather than wringing our hands over shorter-term issues like how we think of climate change now.
>they are too fragile to serve as humanity’s “back-up”. As theme parks or transit vessels, sure. But not as our back-up.
I think this is correct. In fact, where we live now, on a (big) planet, should be our "backup" in that you can have subterranean arcologies that protect you while your habitats are blasted by gamma ray bursts, supernovae, or what have you.
(I stress big because I think we need Earth's gravity; I don't think you could lead a healthy life on Mars or much less the Moon.)
But what makes planets terrible for being your "main space" is that the climates and biology are harder to control (climate change, zoonotic pandemics, volcanos, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.), resources are harder to get (they're buried deep while a wealth of exposed ore exists in the inner Asteroid Belt and a wealth of exposed ice exists in the outer Kuiper Belt), and as someone else here said the space is ironically much smaller than what you could have in a space habitat by surface area or open volume. The gravity's free -- you don't have to spin like you would on a habitat, but you pay for that by the fact that it's very hard to leave. You need to use half your fuel just to reach parking orbit, and it's untenable to build a space elevator. (A space fountain[0] might be doable, but it's still an ordeal.) It only becomes tenable when the gravity's much lower, but then we'll probably run into physiological problems.
