Nostalgia!

[james_davis_nicoll]

Remember L5 colonies? Well,

Three space colony summer studies were conducted at NASA Ames in the 1970s. A number of artistic renderings of the concepts were made. These have been scanned and are available here as small, medium, large, and publication quality jpeg images. Scans by David Brandt-Erichsen.

An example:


I chose this one because as far as I know it contains the only non-white person ever depicted in a space colony illustration from this era.

Comments

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

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.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

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.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

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.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

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.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

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

[resonant.livejournal.com]

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.

[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!

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

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.)

[resonant.livejournal.com]

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

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

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

[resonant.livejournal.com]

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.