/sci/ - Science & Math

>Terraforming

Pointless waster of resources. You could just live in sealed environments on the planet anyway. Hell just keep spreading until the entire planet is a city with manufacturing and indoor agricultural(probably bacteria and protists) sectors. No need for open sky, rivers, or nature in general. By the time we need the space biospheres will probably be ancillary anyway.

And it's better to live in space because of the mining opportunities and no atmosphere to get in the way of your photoelectric cells.

>>2149064
All this culminates in the ultimate plan for species survival, to completely disassemble the all the rocky planets of every stellar system we can get access to and use that mass to build Dyson Swarms of space habitats around the local stars. That way we can continue to survive around those stars until they burn out, which in the case of the lowest mass red dwarfs would be about 120 trillion years. The largest lofstrom loops possible with current engineering can lift 500 million tons a year and you could only fit about 1000 on earth it would still take nearly 10 million years to disassemble the planet. But it can be done only with proven technology, no super materials or new energy sources needed. You could power them using huge convection towers that contain liquid halite, which would be heated by the hot lithosphere you are uncovering. And of course the job would only get easier as the planet is taken apart: less gravity, more heat being radiated, more materials for building and maintaining the loops. That said you still have to use nuclear pulse propulsion to move the material for the first loop into orbit, about 2 million tons of it. But with nuclear pulse propulsion that is doable. We can conquer the cosmos with only what we know today, no soft scifi stuff needed. It will just take a very, very long time. Now of course you can't disassemble stars, or for that matter high mass objects like gas giants. But the earth sized planets or at least large portions of their lithospheres can be consumed. So any species that begins ruthlessly expanding could pull a Stalin and crush all the pacifist space hippies into oblivion with the weight of our own corpses if need be.

>>2037728
As others have previously stated most of the heath concerns that had to do with nuclear testing were caused by the detonation of pure fission, boosted fission weapons weapons, and U238 thermonuclear weapons. This results in a lot of radioactive daughter products such as Cu, Ba, Kr, and especially Sr 90. Since the fission primary of these sub kiloton devices was designed to be as small as possible and are lead cased very little of these daughter products are created as 90%+, depending on the yield since these weapons are adjustable.

The other factor that determines fallout is the amount of particulate material(atmosphereic dust, soil, and water) that is irradiated and can ejected into the atmosphere were it can then be redeposited as fallout. All the proposals either have these devices first stage being a huge multi kiloton pile of chemical explosives that the ship sits on. This will minimize the amount of soil or water irradiated by the take off of the ship.

Also as someone else pointed out we only need to launch a few to build a lofstrom loop, at which point we can simply construct on use NPP in space only making the concerns about radiation moot.

AS for mistakes, the bombs were made to renter the atmosphere and survive a crash without rupturing.

And if you absolutely demand an underground nuclear launch that is also possible to.
"http://www.kschroeder.com/weblog/archive/2009/03/04/the-verne-gun"

See:http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/surfaceorbit.php
and
http://www.kschroeder.com/weblog/archive/2009/03/04/the-verne-gun

"failings...environmental"
You say that like it might not be a good thing in the long term. I am beginning to question your faith in the Machine God.

There is no truth in flesh, only betrayal.
There is no strength in flesh, only weakness.
There is no constancy in flesh only decay.
There is no certainty in flesh but death.