More Words, Deeper Hole

Don't forget the mass-catcher and automated universal make-anything machine located on site.

(The spinoffs are potentially tremendous, since automated universal make-anything machines could revolutionize industry once the space-colony project has made them possible. Of course, it'll be a bit inconvenient to get all our manufactured goods from a colony at L5, the only place where such machines can possibly work.)

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montedavis.livejournal.com

I was sniping at the same kind of SPAAAAACE-centric thinking on Harlie Stross's blog earlier today. Many of the space elevator enthusiasts seem to think that demand for cheap access to space will drive development of strong enough/long enough carbon nanotubes (if indeed that's possible) to make a ground-to-GEO SE possible.

But there would be plenty of important, profitable, even revolutionary uses on earth even for CNT materials well short of SE requirements. So it's much more likely that those will drive (and pay for) most of the effort. In general, dogs wag tails rather than vice versa.

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scott-sanford.livejournal.com

I liked the suggestion of an England-to-France bridge, for example; there are plenty of people who would use that the day it opened.

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The mass catcher was going to be at L2.

This is NASA's secret ultimate goal for the soon-to-be-announced L2 station!!1!

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graydown.livejournal.com

Mass drivers? They have been outlawed by every civilized planet!

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At least they're not using protomatter, which has been denounced by all ethical scientists.

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scentofviolets.livejournal.com

You say. I say that the authorities define evil as the use of protomatter. More cryptofascism, iow.

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dbdatvic.livejournal.com

And we still haven't perfected the schlock driver!

--Dave, or the all-important meme rebroadcaster

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beamjockey.livejournal.com

I mean, all those lunar helium-3 miners are going to have to live SOMEWHERE.

The concept of lunar ~~tralphium~~ helium-3 mines was still about a decade away at the time these paintings were painted.

Edited Date: 2012-11-13 08:20 pm (UTC)

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Yeah, instead the whole thing was predicated on the colonies building solar-power satellites.

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To get serious for a moment: if we want space solar power, I think we need to work on better/cheaper/more efficient lasers and optical->electrical energy convertors (the latter optimized for bright monochromatic light at the laser frequency), just so the first step isn't so gigantic.

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Plus find an application to get around the fact that ground-based solar is always going to be cheaper and more reliable than space-based solar. At best, you get an order of magnitude increase in electricity output when you put your collectors in space (no night, no clouds, no atmospheric attenuation, increased efficiency from being able to radiate heat to deep space at ~4K). Even with space elevators, it will be almost certainly less expensive to install collectors on ten square kilometers of desert than to install a square kilometer of collectors in orbit. From a risk management perspective, it's also better to have a local, scalable, easily-fixed array than a far-off one dependent on the continuous function and alignment of a laser/maser.

Note: I work for a company that makes PV panels for ground-based solar farms, so I have a bit of a bias.

Military applications seem like a good excuse for space-based solar power. You could quickly provide power to forces on the ground or at sea. It'd also be good for constant-thrust interplanetary travel - a VASMIR unit powered by beamed power would be far more effective than one powered by solar panels or a heavy nuclear reactor.

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Yes. I'd look for applications where the laser photons could be used directly, without conversion back to electricity. Photochemical process perhaps, like the Toray PNC process for caprolactam manufacture. Or, laser-driven saucer-shaped drones. Heck, even directly laser-heated high temperature furnaces.

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There was that Japanese scheme to focus the Orbital Death Ray on a station floating on the ocean with a giant Fresnel lens or something, and use it to dissociate seawater to get hydrogen.

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Yeah, I saw that. Not convincing, since hydrogen production from reduced chemical sources (including biomass) is quite hard to beat.

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Or if you have good control over the laser wavelength, separate out elements and even isotopes. It's power-intensive, but you could convert an asteroid into amazingly pure ingots all of the same isotope.

Alpha emission from the solder in electronic assemblies is already a source of single-bit errors, now that transistor sizes are getting so small. There's already a market for isotopically-pure laser-separated Pb for electronics assembly (100x the price of regular Pb); future server rooms might have racks and wiring made of isotopically-pure metals, and be surrounded by metres of isotopically-pure shielding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotope_separation#Laser

Also, refer to "Lead-Free Soldering and Low Alpha Solders for Wafer Level Interconnects", by Dr. Ning-Cheng Lee, Indium Corporation of America.

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dbdatvic.livejournal.com

Oooo, and if you ramp up to a Nicoll-Dyson laser, you could isotopically separate PLANETS. In other solar systems! So they'd be waiting for our laser-pushed generation ships!

--Dave, and we'd have all the He3 we could eat!

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I'm thinking isotopically purified potassium (without that pesky 40K) would be an amusing dietary supplement.

After that, we could move on to food depleted in 14C. But that could be done by growing plants in a greenhouse with CO2 from fossil fuel combustion (since fossil fuels have no 14C.)

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I wonder if you could reduce the risk of cancer with proper screening of isotopes in your food and surroundings.

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I suspect it would be very hard to detect the effect, if any.

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Today, yes. In the future, it might be an economical option, to give you an extra decade before you have to copy your mind into another clone body.

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austin-dern.livejournal.com

I thought it was based on ultra-pure crystal manufacture and the pollutant-free contact welding of metals? Plus, of course, the mighty wealth of ball bearing empires for the improved ball-ness they'd offer.

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And let us not forget the large quantities of EPO manufactured in microgravity, so Lance Armstrong could pedal faster.

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