It Could Come From Outer Space
Posted by Jacques Chester on Monday, February 4, 2008
There are even more visionary ideas - you could get to the spacestation by elevator … via FlyingSinger at Flickr |
I’ve recently loaned and re-read The High Frontier by Gerard O’Neill. Written in the late 70s, the book outlines a plan to build orbiting colonies which in turn would build and sell orbital solar power stations.
It was doable then, though at vast expense: hundreds of staff in orbit, thousands of heavy lifter launches. O’Neill developed a very detailed costing model of such an undertaking. The result was that given 1975 dollars and oil prices, it could be profitable on a 15-20 year horizon.
Subsequently oil prices dropped and the idea disappeared from view.
Recently it has come back into view, mostly through the auspices of the National Space Security Office at the Pentagon. Given a short time to report and with no budget, a career DoD wonk turned to the world wide web, netting hundreds of space experts from across government, industry, academia and throughout the world.
The first results are in: what previously would have cost more than Apollo to establish will cost far less. Advancements in the efficiency of solar sells, materials science, solid state devices, commercial rocketry, robotics and prefabricated manufacturing have drastically simplified and lowered the cost of establishing orbital solar power stations.
Much of the politics is the same: once again the USA finds itself at the end of a very expensive, very unstable energy pipeline. Since then has come additional concerns about climate change.
The beauty of the orbital solar power concept is that once the industrial foothold is established, the marginal cost of power stations falls and keeps on falling.
O’Neill’s vision went as far as a human future in space. He foresaw orbiting colonies with millions of residents living in bucolic, pastoral surroundings. The unlimited solar energy streaming by makes intense industry cheap; the nearly inexhaustible minerals of the moon and the asteroid belt promise unimaginable wealth. Ultimately, O’Neill proposed that a concerted program be undertaken to encourage people to move off the Earth, into colonies, as a much more palatable alternative to enforced population programs.
Anyway. Have a squiz at the NSSO report. It gives me hope in human ingenuity.
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22 Responses to “It Could Come From Outer Space”
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Arthur C Clarke posited similar concepts in the 50s, along with ludicrous ideas such geostationary satellites, inhabited space platforms etc.
Posted on 04-Feb-08 at 9:03 pm | PermalinkSurely the best occupants of such power stations would be, mainly, the physcially handicapped. A couple of muscle bound may be necessary but the vast majority of the duties could easily be performed by those trammelled by gravity. Ironically it would eventually result in their becoming a dominant, instead of (barely) tolerated, class.
amphibious;
I probably should have pointed out that O’Neill dealt with that by rotating the colonies.
Posted on 04-Feb-08 at 10:16 pm | PermalinkKen’s also inserted a graphic about the space elevator (aka ‘beanstalk’) concept, though I observe we’re better off basing calculations off Big Dumb Rockets for now. Otherwise I see your space elevator and raise you Project Orion.
Posted on 04-Feb-08 at 11:56 pm | Permalink“O’Neill’s vision went as far as a human future in space. He foresaw orbiting colonies with millions of residents living in bucolic, pastoral surroundings.”
More like living on a oil rig with the constant low-level humming tech paranioa of being on a long plane flight thrown in.
“Surely the best occupants of such power stations would be, mainly, the physcially handicapped.”
V. interesting point there. This could be developed further. We could start see space workers recruited from the ParaOlympics.
Posted on 05-Feb-08 at 1:47 pm | PermalinkGiven that paralympians are already banned from the ordinary Olympics because they can now run faster, that might be spot-on in more ways than one.
And presumably, they would be more receptive to what I would imagine would be extremely useful in such an environment - multiple exchangeable prothesis!
Posted on 05-Feb-08 at 3:15 pm | PermalinkOh, I don’t know about that. O’Neill calculated that colonies could be built with a diameter of 11kms with a 100% safety margin, if you use materials from the moon (aluminium and titanium, mostly). Large enough to have its own weather.
A fellow called McKendree redid the calculations assuming availability of carbon nanotube construction. The maximum size of a colony goes up to 900kms diameter.
Posted on 05-Feb-08 at 4:09 pm | PermalinkWTF????
Posted on 05-Feb-08 at 8:06 pm | PermalinkWTF indeed. But remember he was writing in the 70s. Club of Rome, Population Bomb etc.
Posted on 05-Feb-08 at 11:05 pm | PermalinkJacques,
So it wasn’t just fashion, haircuts and the end of the Bretton Woods system that was wrong with the 70s, the imminent fear of population bombs, peak oil and ice ages allowed futurologists to indulge in a little bit of Final Solution thinking? I don’t think I’d want to be a colonist with any nutjob that seriously considered enforced population controls.
Posted on 05-Feb-08 at 11:12 pm | PermalinkBrendan;
He didn’t himself endorse population control policies. He about them in the list of problems which he wanted to solve.
Posted on 05-Feb-08 at 11:18 pm | Permalink“Oh, I don’t know about that. O’Neill calculated that colonies could be built with a diameter of 11kms with a 100% safety margin, if you use materials from the moon (aluminium and titanium, mostly).
Oh, I don’t disagree with that vision as a long term goal. Hell I was a SF reading kid too.
My point is that is that the path to achieving that vision is gonna be a lot more dirty, industrial, prosaic and dangerous than all the Home On The LeGrange boosters currently care to dwell on.
“Large enough to have its own weather.”
But just small enough to have an closed ecosystem vulnerable to any stray bacterium or virus. In Bruce Sterling’s “Schismatrix” he paints a short and powerful picture of how the biofarming systems of such O’Neill habitants can spin out of control and go “sour”.
Look, I certainly reckon the overall concept is worth a serious shot. (When I get old, brittle-boned and feeble, I could certainly use some zero-g m’self.) After all the human race didn’t get where it is now without taking some mighty big punts from time to time.
Just pointing out though that we always should be aware that the map is never the territory, that initially colonising frontiers often starts hard, dirty and nasty and that such efforts always always end up way way off the original masterplan.
Real Life Is A Harsh Mistress.
Posted on 06-Feb-08 at 1:48 am | PermalinkI agree with Nabakov - happily, I thought we had a tried and tested solution to this.
Call up the volunteers - send ‘em off. When they run out, send out the convicts!
Posted on 06-Feb-08 at 8:53 am | Permalink“Home on LeGrange”. Very good.
In the mid 70s when O’Neill was pushing his idea, there was an issue of a Stewart Brand mag “CoEvolution Quarterly” which was devoted to space colonies and a subsequent issue devoted to comments on the concept. I recall someone saying it would be like being in a Greyhound bus terminal - slightly greasy.
Still, if it offered grand adventure and the possibility of wealth and honour, there are surely millions of people who would go.
It has to be done. The alternative - staying on this mudball and eating, sleeping and reproducing forever - is scarce to be contemplated. In ten thousand years’ time, when the galaxy is populated and Earth is heritage-listed, historians will consider it the biggest step mankind ever took.
If beaming energy to Earth is a step toward it, okay, I suppose. Seems almost petty though, doesn’t it?
As a sidelight, I counted the acknowledgements in that dry and jargon-riddled report. They list 60 people of whom it appears just two are women.
Posted on 06-Feb-08 at 9:24 am | Permalink“Colonizing the galaxy in eight easy steps“ by Marshall T Savage was an interesting read. His vision has been taken up by a small number of nutjobs calling themselves the Living Universe Foundation.
Posted on 06-Feb-08 at 9:35 am | PermalinkIt’s good to find which of you are the hopeful nerds.
Well put. Lagrange.
I’m a learned pessimist too.
Profit is a main cause of adventure and settlement. Columbus was looking for a shortcut to India. Victoria was built by goldrush settlers, as was much of California. Unlike motivations such as war or conquest, mostly good comes of it.
Posted on 06-Feb-08 at 11:08 am | PermalinkI’ve always been fascinated by Freeman Dyson’s theory of constructing a shell around a failing star, with colonists living on the inner shell. 100% energy capture.
Also interested in the latest punt from NASA which abandons the Bush vision of going back to the Moon, in favour of exploring satellite or orbital station location at the Lagrange points. Seems to make much more sense to me than risking human life in medium to long term adventures in hostile environments which we don’t fully understand or have the science to cope with adequately yet.
Posted on 06-Feb-08 at 3:15 pm | Permalink“I’ve always been fascinated by Freeman Dyson’s theory of constructing a shell around a failing star, with colonists living on the inner shell.”
I have always been amazed by it. The guy’s an astronomer but I cannot see how it can possibly work.
Bits of stuff (like hunks to live on) must orbit; they don’t stay in one place. An orbit is a great circle (or ellipse), not a small circle. So the narrow band of the shell that was actually orbiting would stay in place. Just as a guess it might be possible to make it a mile wide. Or maybe with futuristic materials it could be a 100 miles wide before the stresses of not orbiting with the star at the precise centre cause it to crack up. 100 miles is, relative to the sphere, infinitesimal. Imagine the poles of this shell - all they want to do is fall straight into the star.
The only way anything can remain at a constant distance from a star is to orbit it so every point in this Dyson sphere would have to be orbiting. It would have to consist of hunks whizzing around all at different angles to each other like those blokes do on motorbikes inside the “sphere of death” or whatever it’s called that you see at carnivals. Only there’d be millions of hunks, not just two.
You see this Dyson sphere illustrated quite often. Since the guy is a physicist, I have to wonder if there is something I am missing. Can’t imagine what.
Posted on 06-Feb-08 at 4:24 pm | PermalinkMike;
Dyson didn’t initially say that people would build a single spherical structure. He said that an advanced civilisation would ultimately capture all the output of their sun; that the best way to find such a civilisation is to look for waste heat rather than radio waves etc.
So yes, a bit like the bicycles of death thing. The concept of a spherical megastructure came later and was named for Dyson’s original observation.
Posted on 06-Feb-08 at 5:02 pm | PermalinkI’m a space enthusiast, but color me extremely skeptical about space solar power in the medium term.
The amount of capital investment required to do it is gargantuan, and the payoffs decades into the future. The only plausible mechanism by which this could be done is by governments.
Developing better nuclear reactors, or even fusion power, seems like a much easier task, and essentially makes solar power satellites redundant.
Posted on 06-Feb-08 at 8:25 pm | PermalinkFission-based nuclear, sure. That’s a fairly mature technology. Fusion is still wishful thinking; and in any case it’s still dirty as buggery unless you use helium-3 as your fuel. Which is not a very common isotope of an element not much found on Earth.
Posted on 06-Feb-08 at 9:44 pm | Permalink[...] now mused out loud here at Troppo about orbital solar power and some of the astounding bounty of resources available in the solar system. Time for a bit more [...]
Posted on 22-Feb-08 at 7:19 pm | PermalinkMike Pepperday: it’s well known that a Dyson sphere is not dynamically stable and would require station-keeping. The same is true of a ringworld, an oversight Larry Niven used the second book in the series to address. The real question concerning a Dyson sphere is how to keep things tied down at the poles, and whether there’s enough suitable matter in the average solar system to build one. Typically Dyson spheres are depicted as having roughly the radius of Jupiter’s orbit, which means a surface area something like 15 billion times that of the Earth.
Posted on 11-Apr-08 at 2:41 am | Permalink