41–50 of 164 posts
Hasn't plant growth been happening for a few years in space? Like the salad they grew and ate in ISS. Is this such big news because it's an ongoing step in living in space or am I missing something. Not trying to take away from the achievement but just curious why this is such a big story. I'd thought there would be more news focus on the dark side of the moon updates or astronomy potential of being there type thing.
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Replicators. Feels like no one watches Star Trek anymore. Those writers had more time to think about this stuff than most science labs and engineering teams imho.
>Those writers had more time to think about this stuff than most science labs and engineering teams imho. No, they didn't. They came up with transporters to save money not having effects shots of ships taking off and landing, and replicators are basically the same, a prop meant to save a bit of money while looking "futuristic". Replicators and transporters violate physics (thermodynamics, the uncertainty principle, E…
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Sure, becoming 100% self sufficient wouldn't be a reasonable short term goal but I can't imagine there being any product worth trading in the long term over such distance and given such cost for logistics?
Water possibly could be of great value in the future? Moon has plenty of drinking water. Maybe gold, not sure if there’s gold on the Moon?
I'm not sure it would be viable to return gold from the moon even if the moon was made of solid gold.
To me it seems that the greatest obstacle to space colonization would be maintenance and production of materials and technology needed to sustain and expand the colony. Seems like the last step for truly becoming self sustaining. You'd need extremely small scale factories that can build everything needed for a modern civilization. I wonder what that would take. What the smallest amount of shipments and time would be.…
(Contains some handy tables of relative abundance of substances at the end. Oxygen is really plentiful, it's just attached to all that silicon and iron.)
Challenge is with respect to maintaining temperature which swing wildly between -173C and 100C or more.
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>Those writers had more time to think about this stuff than most science labs and engineering teams imho. No, they didn't. They came up with transporters to save money not having effects shots of ships taking off and landing, and replicators are basically the same, a prop meant to save a bit of money while looking "futuristic". Replicators and transporters violate physics (thermodynamics, the uncertainty principle, E…
What would 3D printers look like in 100 years?
To me it seems that the greatest obstacle to space colonization would be maintenance and production of materials and technology needed to sustain and expand the colony. Seems like the last step for truly becoming self sustaining. You'd need extremely small scale factories that can build everything needed for a modern civilization. I wonder what that would take. What the smallest amount of shipments and time would be.…
Hasn't plant growth been happening for a few years in space? Like the salad they grew and ate in ISS. Is this such big news because it's an ongoing step in living in space or am I missing something. Not trying to take away from the achievement but just curious why this is such a big story. I'd thought there would be more news focus on the dark side of the moon updates or astronomy potential of being there type thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why should you have a 100% complete industry, a colony can trade with Earth like countries trade with each other, a colony could trade some rare resources and buy high tech stuff. The main obstacle a colony will have is the initial buildings/bunker with all the life support and safety tech, plus extra redundancy and a backup plan if something bad happens there or on Earth . If the colony would manage to generate…
Sure, becoming 100% self sufficient wouldn't be a reasonable short term goal but I can't imagine there being any product worth trading in the long term over such distance and given such cost for logistics?
There could also be facilities for experiments that can't be done on Earth, like things that can grow better on low gravity, there may be materials/gases that are rare on Earth and we could grab from asteroids so having space stations and bases around the solar system would be helpful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Water possibly could be of great value in the future? Moon has plenty of drinking water. Maybe gold, not sure if there’s gold on the Moon?
Ah yes, the entirely viable project of moving water from a bone dry vacuum rock to a planet 2/3 covered by water. I'm not sure it would be viable to return gold from the moon even if the moon was made of solid gold.