Comments on Rocketpunk Manifesto: On Colonization

The difference between historical earth colonizati...

2010-06-23T09:09:02.580-07:00

The difference between historical earth colonization and space colonization is that we would have to create rather than destroy. America was once a rich continent. In a short 500 years much of it has been 'consumed'. You can't conquer the stars while the earth rots away underneath your feet. You need a healthy biosphere and a socially healthy, mentally stable civilization to support the enormous undertaking of building a colony on another world. That's not US. The idea that humans can escape to some other world to avoid facing their problems here is ridiculous. Colonization will be doomed to failure because our problems will come with us and accumulate faster than any terraforming effort can progress. Look at the history of Biosphere II. Actually, considering the danger of a single malcontent in a colony jamming open a hatch or urinating in a sterile food processor, the political structure of a colony would have to be far more tyrannical than any communist or fascist state yet imagined. And after hundreds of years of struggling to grow forests on a place like Mars can you really imagine that the nurturers will tolerate some jerk bulldozing them to create a homestead or a strip mall? Every tree and shrub will most likely be carefully inventoried and you'd have to fill out a ream of forms just to pick one wildflower. Essentially the descendants of colonizers of Mars would have to be environmental fanatics and the unauthorized harming of a single leaf of their precious forest would likely carry a sentence of death.

This is a list of rare earths and their uses paste...

2010-02-17T05:17:46.331-08:00

This is a list of rare earths and their uses pasted from an article (Yahoo/Livescience) I just read about China's future shut down of exporting said elements:

Europium: This extremely rare but critical chemical makes the red color for television monitors and energy-efficient LED light bulbs. China is the only country today that produces europium, dysprosium and terbium, which are necessary for either boosting the efficient operating temperature of magnets or for producing red in color displays. In December, USGS scientists discovered Alaskan deposits of europium, but even the few U.S. companies that mine rare earth elements must send the resources to China for processing.

Lanthanum: A primary component of the nickel-metal hydride battery in Toyota's popular hybrid car, Prius. The Prius also incorporates neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium. Lifton estimates that Toyota may use as much as 7,500 tons of lanthanum and 1,000 tons of neodymium per year to build its Prius cars. That dependence on rare earth elements has prompted the company to search for alternative sources outside China.

Neodymium: This represents a main component of the permanent magnets at the heart of the most efficient wind turbines. China's own wind production efforts could consume all the available neodymium production and leave nothing for the rest of the world's booming wind industry, Lifton notes in a recent report titled "The Rare Earth Crisis of 2009." Neodymium is also used in the glass of incandescent light bulbs produced by General Electric, which has unsurprisingly invested in both Chinese and alternative sources of rare earth elements.

Entire article:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20100216/sc_livescience/shortageofrareearthelementscouldthwartinnovation

Certainly not diamonds anyone would want to wear!

2010-02-15T13:10:43.578-08:00

Certainly not diamonds anyone would want to wear!

"- in effect, a 'sand' in which each ...

2010-02-15T10:59:44.048-08:00

"- in effect, a 'sand' in which each carbon atom is a grain."

Which is more or less what I thought, except instead of each atom I postulated that each crystal (ie: the most basic crystalline formation of carbon atom) would be a grain of sand. In fact since we're talking about crystalline structure, table salt might be a closer analogue. You "pour" salt almost like you pour water. The smaller the salt crystals the more fluidic it becomes. If each diamond crystal is only the size of a few atoms (the minimum number of carbon atoms required to make a crystal) and if it is denser than normal crystal (the space between each crystal being smaller than a carbon-carbon bond) then you could get fluidic diamond on which less dense fully crystallized diamonds would float.

Either way, a very strange state of matter, to say the least.

I'm going to guess VonMalcolm's second pos...

2010-02-15T08:55:55.185-08:00

I'm going to guess VonMalcolm's second possibility, that under this pressure carbon is forced into its crystal structure even when liquid - in effect, a 'sand' in which each carbon atom is a grain. This would go with the liquid form being denser than the solid.

I was guessing that 'memorial diamonds' were an SF idea, but a quick google shows otherwise!

I too am wondering if this 'Liquid Diamond'...

2010-02-14T16:29:47.067-08:00

I too am wondering if this 'Liquid Diamond' is just liquid carbon that skips any graphite or other solid carbon phase because of the pressures surrounded it or if the liquid diamond has a certain structure to justify calling it 'Liquid Diamond'.

Some other space type diamond stuff from Wiki:

A type of diamond called carbonado that is found in South America and Africa may have been deposited there via an asteroid impact (not formed from the impact) about 3 billion years ago. These diamonds may have formed in the intrastellar environment, but as of 2008, there was no scientific consensus on how carbonado diamonds originated.

Presolar grains in many meteorites found on Earth contain nanodiamonds of extraterrestrial origin, probably formed in supernovas. Scientific evidence indicates that white dwarf stars have a core of crystallized carbon and oxygen nuclei. The largest of these found in the universe so far, BPM 37093, is located 50 light-years (4.7×1014 km) away in the constellation Centaurus. A news release from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics described the 2,500-mile (4,000 km)-wide stellar core as a diamond. It was referred to as Lucy, after the Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds".

On a side note I came across 'memorial diamonds': each diamond is made by using a loved one's ashes.

Technically we can (and do) synthesize diamond all...

2010-02-14T15:35:33.083-08:00

Technically we can (and do) synthesize diamond all the time now, mainly for concrete-cutting tools and diamond-shard-encrusted sanders. DeBeers is still doing pretty well (not as well as when it had a stranglehold on blood diamonds, but still)

But yes, I thought the difference between plain graphite and diamond was the crystalline arrangement. Maybe it is really a very fine sand of individual crystals, so fine as to act in quasi-fluidic manner, close enough to be called a fluid? After all ice is a molecular "crystal" (molecules in regular arrangement) whereas diamond is an atomic crystal. But if you consider a single crystal of diamond (the minimum number of carbon atoms linked together) to be a "molecule", then I could see it. The odd part would be that those individual crystal structure can get closer to each other than a carbon bond (since liquid diamond is denser than fully crystallized diamond.) That would explain why it can only exist in certain conditions, wherein a single crystal can exist but fail to form bonds with other crystals.

Still trying to work this out. I took my last crystallography class twenty years ago.

I love when news like this comes to challenge our ideas of what matter is. My head was spinning after my first introduction to quantum mechanics. Fun stuff.

I agree, liquid diamond is hard to wrap my mind ar...

2010-02-14T15:23:17.248-08:00

I agree, liquid diamond is hard to wrap my mind around - I thought the whole thing that distinguished diamond from plain old coal was its crystal structure.

And apart from the sheer weirdness/coolness of diamond icebergs on a diamond sea (even at 5 megabars) is the old Clarke story where a guy destroyed the diamond market by learning how to synthesize them, and his ice loving wife divorced him.

(In the story, they also found the Moon littered with huge, gem quality diamonds.)

Liquid diamond, metallic hydrogen, Helium-3. Gas g...

2010-02-13T13:43:39.023-08:00

Liquid diamond, metallic hydrogen, Helium-3. Gas giants hold so many mysteries beneath their colorful shrouds. Too bad extracting those marvels would be beyond acceptable costs, there would be so much to learn if we could delve deep into their cores.

That said the discovery that solid diamond is less dense than liquid diamond (liquid diamond, I still have trouble getting my mind wrapped around the concept) is pretty impressive. I wonder what the practical applications might be, beyond the ability to actually *mold* diamond blades... or could you even. Also, might there be other forms of solid diamond (there are 15 forms of ice, after all) I'm shaking my head here, this is just a little beyond what I can process right now.

Liquid diamond...

Any thoughts on potential 'seas of liquid diam...

2010-02-13T09:32:20.654-08:00

Any thoughts on potential 'seas of liquid diamond' on Uranus and/or Neptune- http://news.discovery.com/space/diamond-oceans-jupiter-uranus.html -as a potential MacGuffinite? -perhaps being gathered in the same mining operations that would acquire He3, though it would be deeper in the respective gravity wells. Potential uses including machine/cutting tools for the asteroid mining, heat sinks for laserstars, and microprocessors for the Rocketpunk Manifesto Super-duper-uberbrain.

From what I gather, even if feasible, cost would greatly out weigh benefit, but I value your opinions much more than the ones I have read on other websites.

es I was just shooting something off the top of my...

2010-02-11T17:21:16.680-08:00

es I was just shooting something off the top of my head, but basically what started as a warrior-monk fortress grew into something more. I'm not sure it fits in the precept of Ideology-driven colonization, it was just a random thought I threw out there. I'm not even all that familiar with Malta anyway, not more than an old passing interest on the Crusades. Thanks for your ideas on it though.

I agree that American judgment in the matter will be colored by Mayflower and Plymouth Rock, even if they weren't really the first long-term colonization effort, or at least attempt. The Pilgrims fled there because there was already the beginning of an infrastructure it seems.

Maybe you could imagine a sect offering services to a remote scientific outpost, say, help us build a few extra prefab shelters and we'll cook and do your laundry, then progressively being taken over by the cult... as you said, the idea can be finagled.

Malta as in 'Knights of?' I wouldn't r...

2010-02-10T10:43:45.141-08:00

Malta as in 'Knights of?' I wouldn't really call it a colony in anything like the common SF sense. (Though there are plenty of SF possibilities in a quasi independent garrison of warrior monks given charge of a crucial stronghold.)

Even Utah and the Boers have made only a modest mark on history (so far). Ideological colonization is certainly a possible trope, but thanks to the Pilgrim Fathers I think 'Murrican SF, especially, has made a bigger deal of it than it really deserves.

Cosmic background history can be finagled - but once it is brought in at all, I wonder about the issues raised, and want to know more. But maybe that is just me!

"You ignored the label on the can saying CAUT...

2010-02-10T05:29:04.662-08:00

"You ignored the label on the can saying CAUTION: CONTAINS WORMS. Once you bring in a precursor race you can't avoid the cosmic background history of your setting."

If you write it properly, there's no big problem. Let's say Earth has the first sentient life in the galaxy. Fast-forward 10k years, humans could be colonizing other worlds with post-singularity tech, now we have a hundred nearby worlds that are human-habitable or whatever we've made ourselves into at that point. Then our civilization collapses. All these worlds are left to their own devices. Servitor race develops sentience and there you go, all these worlds for them to explore. Now if we move one step back and say "what if humans were the servitor race and the original Earth is elsewhere?" then you have it.

I hear what you're saying about cosmic history getting ugly and complicated to document. But who says we have to? If we run with the idea of aliens being truly alien, all we know is that stuff happened and we're not going to really be privy to it. For example, what if the most common form of intelligence in the universe is organic minds spread over entire planets? And what if they never travel anywhere but communicate with the other intelligences in the universe via some sort of radio? There's this wonderful conversation stretching back a billion or so years, all sorts of interesting chatter, but all of it completely beyond human understanding. And our story can continue in complete ignorance of that.

"Ideological and religious motivations for colonization are a well established trope, and have the obvious precedent of the Mayflower. But except for Massachusetts and Utah, how many such colonies have thrived"

Depending on how seriously you take the Bible's account of history, the whole Promised Land was settled as a religious colony. Many of the settlements throughout the Spanish Main had a religious imperative to go along with the gold and slavery. I know the Boers in South Africa used religion to justify a lot of what they did.

This isn't to say that there can't be some intention decay. Religious group sets up space colony, economics don't support it very well, turn to commercial ventures to pay the rent. Economic success now brings new people who aren't religious but like the opportunity. Moderates enjoy the prosperity and fundamentalists decry the worldliness of everything.

Malta?

2010-02-09T21:08:23.301-08:00

Malta?

the only trope left open is the precursor race<...

2010-02-09T20:32:01.383-08:00
the only trope left open is the precursor race

You ignored the label on the can saying CAUTION: CONTAINS WORMS. Once you bring in a precursor race you can't avoid the cosmic background history of your setting.

Ideological and religious motivations for colonization are a well established trope, and have the obvious precedent of the Mayflower. But except for Massachusetts and Utah, how many such colonies have thrived?

I guess it depends on the kind of story you're...

2010-02-08T20:24:57.121-08:00
I guess it depends on the kind of story you're trying to tell, diamond-hard near-future SF, semi-squishy but enjoyable SF, or pure space cheese.

If you're dead set on having earth-type worlds but don't want to hang a lampshade on it by saying "Golly gee, ain't it funny how there are so many Earths out here?" then the only trope left open is the precursor race. They had the tech to engineer all of these planets and then left for whatever reason. Maybe humans evolved on Earth after those guys left and so it's just our luck that we happen to thrive in their ruins.

If you want to stick with harder SF, I think that politics and religion will see the founding of space colonies, at least after the initial phase of pure commercial exploitation. We have a long tradition of founding colonies in foreign lands as a means of escaping persecution at home. Now that the planet has filled up, it gets harder and harder to carve out your own little slice of home.

Before we really see a go of this made in space, I think it's likely we could see autonomous, artificial island states created on Earth -- but it would all be for the same political reasons. We've already seen Sealand -- an offshore artillery platform turned into a data haven.

What it will take to make this idea feasible is the development of sustainable green high technology. I think that the automated fabrication tech we're seeing growing from the rapid prototyping industry will allow us to have our computers and machines without a ginormous industrial base. There's already homesteading movements going on across the world, very strong in the United States. These are people who want to live off-grid. The less you need to buy from the outside world, the more feasible the effort becomes.

As far as offworld living goes, I think that the initial habitats will be cramped and unpleasant but we'll eventually be able to manage proper O'Neill cylinders.

Ever since JFK, American presidents have made gran...

2010-01-03T18:46:28.956-08:00
Ever since JFK, American presidents have made grand space pronouncements that were written for them by staff, about programs developed several rungs below the serious policy level.

This is natural and in a sense proper, because space overall is a fairly minor national priority. When I'm wearing my political hat I hardly think about it.

The space program survives because it has a constituency in the military industrial complex, and because it is moderately popular with the public. If extraterrestrial life were discovered, space would still be moderately popular, but (I would guess) substantially more so than today.

Basically the romance would have something to hang its hat on. This wouldn't change space policy dramatically or overnight, but over time I think it would produce considerably more oomph.

And in this case public ignorance has one ironic advantage - they have no sense of HOW vast interstellar distances are. I imagine most people have only a hazy sense, if any, of the difference between interplanetary and interstellar travel.

While the discovery of potentially life-bearing wo...

2010-01-03T14:36:44.689-08:00
While the discovery of potentially life-bearing worlds outside our solar system would have extraordinary implications (if we can live on it then surely something *must* be living on it), I don't think we could reach them if we didn't in fact have a space-centered economy in the first place. The costs of developing interstellar crafts will be a couple of orders of magnitude beyond merely interplanetary craft.

There are two basic types of old adage. The first is the "no, physics don't actually work that way" like "watched pot never boils", and the "well, DUH" sayings like, "crawl before you walk". In this case not only would the feasibility of an interstellar ship be determined by our interplanetary capabilities, interplanetary ships are a necessary step. No one would dream to gamble on a trip to Proxima if we can't make it to Jupiter. In other words, we won't bypass the planets in our solar system because more than likely they will be necessary stepping stones in any project to travel to another star, for a great variety of reasons.

Would the discovery of an extrasolar life-bearing world accelerate our drive to be a space-faring species? I doubt it, certainly not anywhere near short or medium-term. In any foreseeable case, the Proxima Project would be a massive undertaking over a great many decades, to potentially centuries depending on our progress. If we were to find life on Proxima tomorrow, for example, then the answer is "no".

Ever since JFK, American Presidents have made great announcements about space, going back to the Moon, going to Mars, etc. This attempt to recapture (a cynical soul would say steal) a little of the Kennedy fire has so far utterly failed to drive any significant resurgence in the accelerated space programs that defined his era. The truth of the matter is that his pronouncements had little to do with accelerating the pace of the space program. The acceleration was already going on for a whole other reason than Kennedy's stated goals of peace. The Presidents who followed either knew the speeches were pointless, or failed to realize their pronouncements have little to do with what would actually happen. I don't know if I wish for the former or the latter. In the latter case they are naive idiots who can't be trusted to run a country, in the former they are manipulative bastards who can't be trusted to run a country.

Cynical? Moi?

The point here is that if a terra-compatible planet is found in another star system, politicians will rush to say they've initiated a program to take us there. They will be promptly ignored. Within a decade the fact that they made the pronouncement at all will have been forgotten.

There is only one reason we are still in space, and a good reason we haven't gone back to the moon: satellites make our daily lives easier (for a relative use of the term easier). Between weather satellites that warn us to take our umbrellas, to satellite TV informing us how many medals the USA is winning at the Olympics on the other side of the world, to the GPS locators that allow the suburban, Suburban-driving soccer-mom to find the way to the soccer field at the next town over, space shapes our lives. However it is difficult for said soccer-mom to see what benefits she'll get from the construction of a massive starship that will take five decades to get to another star... and an additional 4.25 years for the radio message saying they'd arrived safely. Unfortunately, said soccer-mom pays taxes. Guess where she'd rather her tax money go?

Whoa, this blog has gone from the negativities of ...

2010-01-02T22:07:48.693-08:00
Whoa, this blog has gone from the negativities of space colonization, to McGuffinite and Nuclear Fusion, to self-propagating robot ants, to gravity drives, to colony politics, all the way back to the positives of space colonization: I am just trying to write a sci-fi story: I am not trying to make my head explode! I hope you Rocketpunk Commenters are as smart and informed as you seem to be because I am cutting and pasting a lot of your comments to my own notes for future reference!
-------
What if the Kepler Mission, Terrestrial Planet Finder, or Darwin (the latter two if ever launched) discovered an Earth-like planet (liquid water, oxygen atmosphere, etc) in a habitable zone around Alpha Centauri A or B: would a planet already 'terraformed' (or perhaps much more easily terraformed) just waiting to be developed light a fire in the will to colonize space? Would space colonization perhaps pass right by Mars, Venus, the Asteroid Belt, Calypso, Europa, etc.? Or, perhaps, would a 'nearby' habitable planet be the impetus in colonizing the solar system, the impetus in mining McGuffinium (He-3), thus solving the aforementioned Catch-22 (Jean Remy) of needing He-3 to support the infrastructure to get He-3. (Are fusion rockets enough for generational one-way nearby interstellar travel?)

I understand that even nearby interstellar travel is way out there, but with that juicy piece of fruit just waiting out there for us: How could we resist going after it? How far into the future is such a mission if we really pushed towards it? Are we talking anti-matter drives and other magi-tech?

Note: Kepler Mission scientists will reveal the space telescope’s latest discoveries at a news briefing in Washington on Monday, Jan. 4, 2010.

During the Gold Rush of early USA, the people that...

2009-12-03T04:04:30.624-08:00
During the Gold Rush of early USA, the people that made their fortunes did it by selling shovels. That would be my model for Mars. Mars wouldn't be a goal in and of itself, but rather a means to make asteroid mining more efficient.

It's hard for me to imagine that we would have...

2009-12-02T21:15:59.349-08:00
It's hard for me to imagine that we would have a large presence in the asteroid belt and not have a large presence on Mars.

But if the asteroids are being mined for rare stuff to be shipped to Earth, Mars is only an incidental market. And on average it is no closer to any given asteroid than Earth is.

In a story setting you could easily finagle a trade pattern that connects Mars and the asteroids, but it is not at all a gimme that they will have much traffic connection.

One man's waste (heat) is another man's tr...

2009-12-02T13:04:20.687-08:00
One man's waste (heat) is another man's treasure(d source of thermal energy.)

As a somewhat related side note. I'm part of ...

2009-12-02T12:55:45.703-08:00
As a somewhat related side note. I'm part of a group that has been recovering trees that have been cut down before they get chopped up into mulch. We take the trunks and mill them into lumber and then dry it. I'm taking part of the project because I'm also an end user of the lumber and much of the operation I'm already doing with conventional lumber. However, when it comes to drying, I'm using the waste heat from my window air conditioner to pump up the heat in my kiln enough to dry the lumber. So I run my air conditioner for the waste heat. The cool office space is a bonus. I can justify the expense of air conditioning by virtue of it being needed for an industrial process. The same sort of synergy applies to space industry and colonization.

Seeing that picture I've got to wonder how man...

2009-12-02T12:13:49.024-08:00
Seeing that picture I've got to wonder how many people have quipped about "a throne fit for a king."

On a more serious note,
The properties of the platinum group metals and other siderophiles, like ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, etc. are very interesting to look into. For instance, ruthenium would be an ideal material to use in making faster, smaller, and more efficient microcircuitry and data storage. Rhenium is used in many high-strength superalloys. Iridium and rhenium have extremely low wear and corrosion rates.
I could see a space-based industry being used to fabricate a lot of high-tech stuff that would be harder here on earth because of process contamination, rarity of raw materials, etc. Stuff like high-end electronic components, super-materials, catalysts, etc. would have a very high value-weight ratio, and maybe that ratio could get large enough to justify the cost of producing them in space. This would also give us a reason to keep people in space for long periods of time: we'd need technicians, researchers, and engineers on hand while the fabrication is going on.

-Eric

We already have gold toilets. http://www.vintage...

2009-12-02T10:01:52.422-08:00
We already have gold toilets.

http://www.vintagetub.com/blog/2009/04/solid-gold-toilet.html