/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.10647335]

I watched jeff bezos blue origin conference earlier, and was left with a few questions, but one question in specific. are the o,neil cylinders better than terraforming planets? in my mind, building these structures would take longer than terraforming a planet. am I wrong?

[Anonymous No.10647340]

well you can’t fit a trillion people on the inner planets sooooooo

[Anonymous No.10647344]

>>10647335
more importantly: How are we supposed to believe Bezos can put a man on Mars if he can't even put hair on his own head?

[Anonymous No.10647390]

>>10647344
amaZING

[Anonymous No.10647423]

>>10647344

[Anonymous No.10647428]

>>10647335
O'Neill cylinders are better because inappropriate speech and wrong thinking can be eliminated easily simply by ejecting offenders houses into space.

[Anonymous No.10647433]

>>10647335
>are the o,neil cylinders better than terraforming planets?
They're more possible. Terraforming within the solar system is extremely unlikely.
And even better is the Stanford Torus.

[Anonymous No.10647489]

>>10647433
>Stanford Torus
I’m going to do some in depth research on that. I’ve heard a little about it before, but never gave it much thought.

[Anonymous No.10647505]

>>10647335
>terraforming
kek
Are you 12?

[Anonymous No.10647517]

>>10647335
>are the o,neil cylinders better than terraforming planets?

Way more mass efficient. With an o-neil cylinder you only need enough atmosphere to fill each cylinder. With a planet, you need enough atmosphere for 100km high across the entire surface, before a single person can breathe there.

And you can have 1g gravity.

[Anonymous No.10647524]

>>10647505

[Anonymous No.10647547]

>>10647335
>>take longer than terraforming
BULLSHIT. Stanford torus requires about 10 megatons of material or about 1.7 pyramids of giza. A single mass driver on the moon can provide 1.1 Megatons a year assuming 1970s tech.
https://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75SummerStudy/Chapt5.html#LUN
So construction would take merely years. Once we get some infrastructure in place we can build colonies faster. We don't need radically new technology to build space colonies in a reasonable amount of time. Terraforming mars has recently shown to be impossible with current technology:
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2018/mars-terraforming/

[Anonymous No.10647555]

>>10647335
They are much faster than terraforming a planet, at least in terms of current-day population growth rates (or even those a few hundred years down the line). When O'Neill first proposed his colonies, he looked for the upper limit on their size based on the best materials and techniques of his day (the 70's). The biggest O'Neill Cylinder built and powered by the finest 70's-era technology money could buy would have about the same habitable surface area as Switzerland.

Some people have taken up his basis of calculation again, with the finest materials and cutting-edge technology available to the present day. The result is a thin, pencil-like composite structure with a habitable internal surface about the size of the entire territorial claim of Russia.

TL;DR - why terraform a scant handful of worlds, when we can build them to order by the thousands?

[Anonymous No.10647577]

>>10647335
if you read the book your picture is taken from you'd already have an answer to all of your questions

[Anonymous No.10647647]

>>10647555
>why terraform a scant handful of worlds, when we can build them to order by the thousands?
Anything made by the thousands lacks authenticity and taste.

[Anonymous No.10647680]

>>10647335
They have a bunch of advantages. For the starters they can replicate 1G with no trouble.

If we get orbital construction going for real making them will also be easy due to zero G.

Terraforming Mars has a bunch of big problems even beyond the low gravity like how it's a toxic wasteland or how it's going to lose atmosphere over time.

[Anonymous No.10647704]

>>10647647
>and so the space hipster movement bean

[Anonymous No.10647711]

Living on planets is a meme.

It takes an insane amount of energy to land and take off from a planet due to its high gravity. And you can only live on the surface.

It makes more sense to deconstruct a planet for its raw materials and make artificial habitats like oneal cilinders because you could make a billion times more living space that way and have them be mobile and more efficient at the same time as well.

No advanced species lives on planets.

[Anonymous No.10647718]

>>10647335
The big disadvantage is that you're effectively living on a spaceship with a very thin reservoir of atmosphere and hydrosphere. By necessity it must be run under an extremely tight dictatorship.

[Anonymous No.10647719]

>>10647718
>it must be run under an extremely tight dictatorship.
So?

[Anonymous No.10647728]

>>10647335
You'd need a whole industry on Moon to be able to even think about building one of those. Easier than terraforming Mars to Earth-like conditions? Sure, million times. Easier than terraforming Mars to achieve conditions suitable for plant life, allowing people to walk on the surface without pressurized suits? Doubt so.

[Anonymous No.10647748]

>>10647719
SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED

[Anonymous No.10647779]

>>10647718
Do you think safer designs are possible?

[Anonymous No.10647782]

>>10647779
They would need to be very large indeed. Large enough that the spin is enough to hold in kms of atmosphere without a roof. There would always be a problem of "oceans" being very shallow and prone to getting fucked up. The idea is to reduce maintenance to the bare minimum, and that's hard to do on an artificial structure.

[Anonymous No.10647852]

>>10647748
You're actually both right, human bodies should be augmented with projectile weapons and also human minds should be rigorously conditioned to eliminate any negative traits that make some people the kind of people who shouldn't have projectile weapons.

[Anonymous No.10647855]

then those fucking aliens would think twice before boarding our sweet ramas

[Anonymous No.10647896]

Pros
No gravity wells - less cost for travel and smaller asteroid impact rate
Gravity control, both 0G and 1G for recreation and industry
Climate control
Atmosphere control
Daylight cycle control
Can be built anywhere
Constant solar energy
More efficient use of mass, both for generating gravity and pressure

Cons
Large upfront cost(Lower than terraforming, but still higher than simply building an outpost in a body such as the moon)
No developed industry yet
No natural magnetosphere
No natural resources(unless built inside an asteroid, resources always have to be transported from somewhere else)

[Anonymous No.10647914]

Is terraforming even possible with current technology? Is building a space structure? Which one is more possible?

[Anonymous No.10647930]

>>10647896
>No natural magnetosphere
Making them spin to generate G will automatically also create a magnetosphere assuming the entire station has power running through it.
>No natural resources
I'm assuming they will use fusion power generators on board next to the solar power they have access to. In that case you could actually transmutate the matter you want to have locally. In fact you could build a system that "beams matter at the speed of light" to you because they'd send huge amounts of energy towards you that travel at the speed of light and you locally use that energy to transmutate whatever matter you'd need instead of having to physically send matter from station to station which is less efficient and takes a lot more time since matter can't reach the speed of light.

Remember that we should abuse E=MC^2 to our advantage by turning matter into energy when transporting it and then turning it back into matter when it reaches its destination to transmit it far more efficiently.

[Anonymous No.10647944]

>>10647428
I like the way you think.

[Anonymous No.10647948]

>>10647914
>Is building a space structure?
This is literally the ISS but with adding more and more modules over time to make it bigger and bigger.
>Is terraforming even possible with current technology?
Mars literally needs what we are doing to Earth right now. It needs to have a thicker atmosphere filled with CO2. The fact that we are doing it to Earth and even specialized in adding CO2 to the atmosphere should tell you how good we'd be able to do so.

However it makes no rational sense to terraform or even live on a planet once you are a space faring species so what would happen is that we'd have automated droids work on other planets and slowly deconstruct them into their raw materials out of which we'd build artificial habitats.

This is personally also why I think environmentalism is a bit silly. It's not like the Earth is still going to be around in 1000 years since we'd have long since deconstructed it by then.

[Anonymous No.10647962]

>>10647428
>>10647944
No but really what would happen is that people of a certain mindset would most likely form their own communities and have their own colonies.

You'd start to see libertarian colonies, communist colonies, cult colonies etc. These would probably be extremely specific as well so 2 communists with only a 1% difference in world view would both have their separate colony as well.

So they wouldn't try to kill members that disagree with them. Instead I think the colonies would have a agreement with each other to send people with different ideologies to their respective colony as this is in everyone's best interest as it would increase the population of the colonies instead of shrink them by killing.

In such a post-scarcity society the difference in economic system and ideology would barely matter anyway and warfare would become impossible as there would be nothing to gain from it and everyone was living in their own "isolated worlds" anyway.

[Anonymous No.10647978]

>>10647962
>only a 1% difference in world view would both have their separate colony as well
this would lead to the Belt becoming a haven for religious maniacs, crackpots, and cults. Expect mass group suicides on the regular.

[Anonymous No.10647985]

>>10647962
But can you drop colonies onto each other?

[Anonymous No.10647989]

>>10647985
With enough delta-v you can drop anything onto anything else.

[Anonymous No.10647990]

>>10647962
>agreement with each other
This is never going to hold, you know. It's always going to be in some cunt's interest not to stick by the agreement. The 21st century is going to have so many happenings it'll make your head spin.

[Anonymous No.10647997]

>>10647990
No what I mean is that it's literally the best choice out of self-interest.

If you have a colony of say 5000 people and 500 people have a different ideology within your colony. You could kill them without the agreement and end up with 4500 people. Or you could send them out with this agreement and receive people with similar ideology to your own back from other colonies over time.

this agreement is a win-win with no downsides. In both cases people that don't have your ideology disappear. But with the agreement in place new people also join over time.

warfare wouldn't make sense as there would be nothing to gain from war. They are already living in a post-scarcity world so there aren't any resources they would really have to fight over and there would be no conflicts happening as the colonies would be isolated from each other all living in their completely separate worlds.

Throughout history war has always been incentive driven. It was basically a cost-gain analysis.

They's reason that the gain in land and resources was worth the conquest and the loss and death they'd get due to the warfare.

In such a world with all these colonies there would be no resource shortage due to being a post-scarcity society so there would be no incentive in the first place while still having the cost of not only risking manpower but your entire station being easily destroyed wiping out not only all your people but by definition your ideology as well.

The end result is that they'd just be completely isolated colonies without any contact outside of exchanging people with different ideologies.

[Anonymous No.10648001]

>>10647997
>warfare wouldn't make sense as there would be nothing to gain from war.
I know this appears to make sense, but people have used this reasoning many times in the past and it never works out the way they expect. I am just wary of putting my trust in any sort of NAP.

[Anonymous No.10648121]

>>10647930
it's only efficent if we assume perfect efficiency in transmuting energy into matter

99.99% efficiency in transforming energy into matter still wastes like 2 kilotons of energy per kilo matter, pretty sure it would be more efficient to space truck it from the asteroid belt even with the transit time

[Anonymous No.10648126]

>>10647997
killing your ideological opponents reduces the spread of their ideology and the conversion of your adherents into their adherents

[Anonymous No.10648139]

>>10648121
>99.99% efficiency in transforming energy into matter still wastes like 2 kilotons of energy per kilo matter, pretty sure it would be more efficient to space truck it from the asteroid belt even with the transit time
Speeding up and slowing down that matter takes more energy than gets lost by the transmission of the energy.

[Anonymous No.10648141]

>>10648139
Really, is that so? Do you have any figures?

[Anonymous No.10648145]

>>10648126
You don't understand. These colonies wouldn't have contact with each other. It's not like they are converting each other's people and having an ideological war.

It's more like if a child develops fascist ideals he'll get send to the "fascist sector" where millions of fascist colonies are and then gets adopted by the one that fits his mindset the most.

>>10648001
You need to realize what war actually is. War is taking something by force. There is nothing to take while everything is there to lose.

What would they fight wars for?
>Resources
Nope you can just generate more when needed in a post-scarcity environment
>Neighbors/land
Nope you can isolate yourself and move your colony to wherever you want in the universe. If you want more land you can just generate it by using resources
>People
Just clone or artificially grow more people or put your people into an impregnation frenzy.

There is no reason to wage war as there are only downsides with no possible upsides.

[Anonymous No.10648173]

>>10648145
>These colonies wouldn't have contact with each other
yeah except humans don't like that
the moment a human sees another human doing something he doesn't like he will try to stop him out of spite, compassion, will to power or so on. War is for resources, sure. But who are competing for those resources? Nations and peoples, and nations and peoples are built on common codes of behavior. Poor workers in a country might see the rich capital and go there for riches, but if the rich city is in another country, then they won't just calmly migrate (either because they dont want to or because the city won't let them). Christians spreading through europe converted pagans just out of ideological demand. If it was only about resources why not just trade with the pagans, and why did they let them maintain their countries after conversion? Because everyones desire to spread the correct opinions.

[Anonymous No.10648223]

>>10647978
>Expect mass group suicides on the regular.

[Anonymous No.10648245]

>>10647335
Why do people here get so excited over this bs? One tiny meteoroid, a few technical malfunctions, even a miniscule solar flare, or a single terrorist, and the whole thing becomes so much scrap metal.

A planet is literally a billion times more rugged and safe than this crap.

[Anonymous No.10648252]

>>10648141
No but you can see this easily yourself if you look at the theoretical limits and the formula involved.
Transmission of energy is E=MC^2. Using laser beams you could precisely target something to send the energy to.
accelerating mass would require you to use (kin)E=1/2MV^2 twice. One for bringing it up to speed and one for slowing it down. Propulsion of mass would require you to pack that (kin)E on top of the mass while the transmission only needs you to convert the mass to energy. Which theoretically only loses some negligible amount of energy.

Let's say we want to send M=10,000 kg of cargo to a colony 0.1 lightyears away. Using the transmission method this would result in
E=MC^2
E=8,987*10^20 Joules.
Assuming 99.99% efficiency (would probably be higher but it's the rate you gave) this would waste ~9*10^16 Joules

Transporting the cargo at a reasonable time to reach it (3 months) requires 30% the speed of light. Fusion propulsion could have acceleration of v=700km/s=700,000 meters per second

(Kin)E=1/2MV^2
2,5*10^16 Joules times 2 (also for slowdown)= 5*10^16 Joules which is very close to the cost of transmission. Only the difference is that the transmission cost stays the same at higher distances and moves at the speed of light.

if the efficiency is just 1 order of magnitude bigger in reality cargo transport would be complete nonviable.

Fuck after having written this all out and reading your post I see that you're talking about the solar system's astroid belts of which the kuiper belt only has a diameter of 0.00006 light years and therefor conventional cargo WOULD be more efficient.

It's still ridiculous that interstellar trade will be faster than local trade due to this though.

[Anonymous No.10648277]

>>10648252
the question is though, is intersolar trade even necessary? If all that's important is raw energy, why couldn't that distant colony just harvest energy itself from the local environment (and if there is no local environment, why the fuck are you even there?)? And given that you have matter generation technology, can't you even run that process in reverse, where dissolving some worthless tiny space rock of a ton gives you 21 gigatons energy so you don't even need to worry about finding suitable energy sources?

[Anonymous No.10648299]

>>10647335
orbital habitats are the future, but sensible, modern designs such as this one, not oneil cylinders

https://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/Kalpana/KalpanaOne.html

[Anonymous No.10648307]

>>10648245
Terrorism would be a problem thats true

[Anonymous No.10648323]

>>10648277
You'd need it for megastructures and energy consuming effects.

Also I hope you realize that human energy usage will just scale with how much energy we have access to. We'll invent all kinds of new devices and make gigawatt usages commonplace.

[Anonymous No.10648346]

Just a reminder that terraforming mars is not possible with current tech:
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2018/mars-terraforming/

[Anonymous No.10648349]

>>10648346
clathlates polar caps and minerals are very easy to fix and let the carbon loose. Trapped CO2 would ironically get released on its own once the planet warms up enough

That in itself will increase the atmospheric CO2 by 500% and make its atmosphere thicker which is very handy and might be good enough for the short term.

[Anonymous No.10648371]

>>10648349
It's just not enough anon.
>>warms up enough
that will take thousands of years.

[Anonymous No.10648611]

>>10647948
>The fact that we are doing it to Earth and even specialized in adding CO2 to the atmosphere should tell you how good we'd be able to do so.
We do that on Earth by burning oil or coal with oxygen in our atmosphere.
All things that don't exist on mars.

[Anonymous No.10648616]

>>10648299
I don't know about that design, but truth to be told O'Neil himself always said his designs were just prototypes and didn't expect they would be the final ones.

[Anonymous No.10649805]

>>10648145
War is the quest for honor and glory. No amount of raw minerals can replace that.

[Anonymous No.10649825]

>>10647433
At a small scale, yes, in the far future, no. The progression that'll likely happen is:
Space Stations with rotating habs -> small Lunar and Martian outposts for resource extraction and tourism/novelty->stanford tori->oneill cylinders

[Anonymous No.10649838]

>>10647948
>It's not like the Earth is still going to be around in 1000 years since we'd have long since deconstructed it by then.
Nah the Earth will be around forever in a space museum.

[Anonymous No.10649853]

>>10648616
It's literally just a giant cylinder. So what 99% of people mean when they say oneill cylinder.

[Anonymous No.10649869]

>>10649825
ISS -> Mars/Lunar outpost -> Rotating space habs -> long term colony ships -> oneill cylinders

[Anonymous No.10650035]

>>10647335
>am I wrong?
Yes.

[Anonymous No.10650068]

>>10647782
Maybe reduce the amount of maintenance the inhabitants require.

[Anonymous No.10651538]

>>10650068
How?

[Anonymous No.10652602]

>>10648245
Literally none of those things are true and its clear you have never read anything about the subject.

kill yourself faggot

[Anonymous No.10652612]

>>10647335
Terraformation is a meme. It would take millions of years with improbable results.

[Anonymous No.10652646]

>>10647344
I know there was a logical fallacy for this kind of statement but I forgot what it was
it wasn't a false analogy or false comparison or so was it?

[Anonymous No.10653133]

>>10647962
No, they'd just kill the heretics. The only reason people are starving right now is economical thinking, not an actual lack of resources. If the small transport costs of moving things on earth isn't enough to keep people from being bastards, then the costs of space transport sure as hell won't.
I'll believe in post-scarcity when you can teach humans not to hoard at the expense of other human lives. Ironically this is a thread about Bezos, a shining example of a hoarding bastard shilling excuses for his greed.

[Anonymous No.10653576]

>>10650068
That sounds ominous.

[Anonymous No.10654522]

>>10652612
Millions?

[Anonymous No.10654681]

>>10654522
That seems extreme?

[Anonymous No.10655969]

>>10648346
Clathrates?

[Anonymous No.10655997]

>>10648346
>>10648349
>>10648371


Solving the temperature and atmosphere problem still completely fails to address the lower gravity problem - and the degenerative effect this will have on Mars's offspring.

[Anonymous No.10656038]

fusion power is a meme
Anyone who think that they are viable in long term is retarded.

[Anonymous No.10656207]

>>10652602
>"kill yourself"
>"faggot"

What are you, 10 years old? What a magnificent counterargument. Really, I'm baffled, at a loss for words, stupidified. Jesus, I just came out of a debate in another board with similar levels of argument. It's like people like you and I are from an entirely different race. Just... wow.

[Anonymous No.10656220]

>>10648223
That gave me a good laugh anon, thanks I needed it.

[Anonymous No.10656236]

>>10656038

edgy

[Anonymous No.10656314]

>>10647335
lmao do you even know what terraforming is?
not only you need ship billion tons of billion chemicals from one planet to other you also need to make sure that this soup of SHIT will form a stable system that can exist from more than a decade AND will be suitable for human living

[Anonymous No.10656317]

>>10656314
>that can exist from more
for*

[Anonymous No.10656324]

>>10647555
Probably a dumb question, but does it take in account meteorites even tiny ones hitting the thing?

[Anonymous No.10656329]

>>10647896
I can't believe that building that sort of thing would be cheaper than terraforming, clearly I know jack shit about this argument.
Maybe with planets better than Mars.

[Anonymous No.10656335]

>>10655997
Question, let's say that I "landed" the moon on Earth without throwing it, regardless of how impossibly hard it would be and the tital waves.

How would earth's gravity be affected?

[Anonymous No.10656398]

>>10647335
>in my mind, building these structures would take longer than terraforming a planet. am I wrong?
you're not just wrong but also retarded

[Anonymous No.10656400]

>>10656324
Yes.

[Anonymous No.10656443]

>>10652646
it's just ad hominem

[Anonymous No.10656599]

>>10656335
The mass of the moon is 1.2% that of the earth. Your plan would increase gravity on earth but not enough to really matter. Obviously there would be localized affects if you didn't distribute the mass equally. Gym memberships would increase some.

[Anonymous No.10656618]

>>10647555
Difference of living on a huge solid rock vs living in a relatively paper thin tube that would be fucked if it gets damaged beyond its repair capabilities.

[Anonymous No.10656856]

>>10656618
This is an stupid argument because the "huge solid rock" is below you, and thus, not protecting you in any way. You could say the atmosphere is gonna destroy small enough metorites, however the wall of a well-designed habitat would do just the same. And the "huge solid rock" is gonna attract other huge rocks, which are going to eventually fuck you up, if you don't actively deflect them. This is not a problem for cylinders, because a chance of being hit by an large asteroid while orbiting a "clean" area, like around a planet, is very, very low.

[Anonymous No.10657850]

>>10647335
>o,neil cylinders

Wrong space colony shape. Think more along the lines of no windows and a big rotating donut in space with solar panels and heat dissipators everywhere. Nuclear power can be used, but then you'd just replace the solar panels with epic amounts of heat dissipators.

A legit O'Neil cylinder would just give everyone inside cancer due to the lack of proper shielding.

>in my mind, building these structures would take longer than terraforming a planet. am I wrong?

Terraforming would take 100,000s of years and we don't have the tech to do it. However, we do have the tech to make torrid space colonies right now.

[Anonymous No.10657857]

>>10647335
+10 for Space Doughnuts.

[Anonymous No.10657861]

>>10647335
We've never done either, so hard to tell.

If we can get off this rock and get serious, we'll probably do both.

[Anonymous No.10657866]

>>10647547
Why the one weird reference to the pyramid?

[Anonymous No.10657871]

>>10647680
To be fair, at the timescales that Mars, terraformed, would see important loss of atmosphere, a orbital habitat probably will too. What with the occasional leak here and there, less that 100.0000000? efficiency in airlocks, and what-not.

[Anonymous No.10657874]

>>10647782
>There would always be a problem of "oceans" being very shallow and prone to getting fucked up.

Tubes to recirculate the flup.

[Anonymous No.10657883]

>>10647914
>Is terraforming even possible with current technology? Is building a space structure? Which one is more possible?


We can't do either with current technology. We are probably much closer to being able to do large habitats.

But, you got to build a shit-ton of habitats to get the living space one terraformed Mars would give you. Perhaps even a shit-ton to the shit-tonth power.

[Anonymous No.10657893]

>>10647948
>This is literally the ISS but with adding more and more modules

It literally is not that at all. But doing something like that is possibly good practice in construction techniques, and it could be scavenged later for materials.

[Anonymous No.10657902]

>>10648145
>You need to realize what war actually is. War is taking something by force.


Sometimes it is just "Kill those subhuman motherfuckers because they are not us and we hate them."

I guess you could narrowly define war to exclude that, but then you still have that problem, that something that looks a Hell of a lot like war, unless you spend time talking to the participants about motives, is still likely to happen.

[Anonymous No.10657904]

>>10648145
>There is no reason to wage war as there are only downsides with no possible upsides.

"Kill them so they can never decide to kill us" has an obvious upside -- they never get to decide to kill us.

[Anonymous No.10657909]

>>10648346
Getting more than a about a half dozen guys into LEO is not possible with current tech. Getting one guy above LEO would be tricky.

So building a large habitat is also not really something we can do right now.

We're not a huge technological breakthrough away from being ale to start trying. But we've never built anything even vaguely comparable to a large scale permanent habitat.

[Anonymous No.10657912]

>>10653133
>The only reason people are starving right now is economical thinking, not an actual lack of resources.

Do not worry, friend, the organic and locovore movements are doing their damnedest to bring back genuine scarcity.

[Anonymous No.10657916]

>>10656599
>The mass of the moon is 1.2% that of the earth.

I'm surprised that this is correct. I had thought the mass of the moon was something on the order of 1/4 that of Earth. Probably based that on the gravity, but did not take into account being closer to the center of mass on the moon.

[Anonymous No.10657925]

>>10656856
COmparing one Mars to one cylinder, though, is misleading. You need lots of cylinders to get similar living space. You would not see them all hit by one big rock --- so your chances f a dinosaur-killer moment would be almost nil.

[Anonymous No.10657946]

>>10656599
>>10657916
I was astonished, too. So I looked it up.
Moon's mass: 0.073 x 10^24 kg
Earth's mass: 5.97 x 10^24 kg
That's 1.22%. !!
nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/