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

[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.