"YOU PROMISED ME MARS COLONIES. INSTEAD, I GOT FACEBOOK"
Well, we also didn't have the Cold War go hot. Win some, loose some.
Space Colony Art from the 1970s
31–40 of 59 posts
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right on. To add to this, early stage terraforming is in the immediate rather than long-term plan for Mars. As soon as we start producing CO2 on Mars, we're on our way. I'm not against colonizing space itself, but early seagoing explorers didn't attempt to colonize the ocean. We need to establish ourselves in environments that allow easy production of oxygen, water, and food. In the end, it is about money. It takes a…
> because it can't hold atmosphere easily But neither can Mars. Most of its early atmosphere was blown away and that will continue. There's nothing we can do about the lack of gravity. The problem with Mars is that it is cold, terminally. The nuclear furnaces have gone out. I haven't seen a proposal from the terraformers that counteracts that. You might be able to counteract it with CO2, but then that gets blown away…
> Unfortunately, the engineering and science obstacles are huge, enormous.
Yes, I agree we should go to Mars. I don't see the urgency, though. I mean, in terms of the humanity-backup situation, ten years or a hundred, doesn't really make much difference.
We would be better putting the money into energy research, and when we've got that figured out, then we tackle mars.
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#33Many of these pictures are based on designs described in one of my favorite books of all time, The High Frontier , by Gerard K. O'Neil. In it, O'Neil, a Princeton physicist and founder of the Space Studies Institute, goes on to describe in great technical detail the feasibility of building artificial space habitats of varying sizes. I heartily recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in space. The ideas from t…
They're also featured heavily in T.A. Heppinheimer's Colonies in Space , now available in full text online: http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/index.html That featured strongly in my childhood imagination. I'm no longer the technotopian I was at the time, but it's a powerful vision. Much of what it (and O'Neil) promoted should have been done by now were it possible.
O'Neill clearly wanted it to happen and let it bias his estimates. But what bothered me the most was that even if you did follow their strategy of build-powersats-in-place-out-of-extraterrestrial-materials, you could do it cheaper with workers in tin cans (and lots of automation and teleoperation) instead of livable colonies. The argument against this wasn't too convincing, but I was a teenager and figured "Hey, a lot can happen in a few decades." A lot more than actually did so far, sigh.
I still think large-scale work could have been done in space, and wasn't more for societal than technical reasons.
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#34I remember some of these, which were reprinted in magazines like Odyssey (and maybe even Omni ?) in the 70s and 80s. The images, along with colony/exploration books by Larry Niven, Ben Bova, and James P. Hogan, really had the power to set one's imagination on fire.
They were also reprinted in Cosmos from Carl Sagan. It brings great memories back !
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#35"YOU PROMISED ME MARS COLONIES. INSTEAD, I GOT FACEBOOK"
Well, we also didn't have the Cold War go hot. Win some, loose some.
Maybe, but we are still stockpiling weapons that can destroy our whole civilization at any time. It's not because we are currently in a relatively peaceful era that it's going to last in the long term.
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#36I'm pretty sure that I have seen most of these images in my Dad's old Popular Science magazines. I'm really glad to see this art again.
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#37[Don Davis](http://www.donaldedavis.com/), one of the illustrators whose work appears here, was part of the team of artists gathered to provide the visual effects for [Cosmos](http://hypertexthero.com/logbook/2014/03/cosmos/).
[Some of his recollections](http://www.donaldedavis.com/PARTS/SAGAN.html) of working with Sagan.
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're also featured heavily in T.A. Heppinheimer's Colonies in Space , now available in full text online: http://www.nss.org/settlement/ColoniesInSpace/index.html That featured strongly in my childhood imagination. I'm no longer the technotopian I was at the time, but it's a powerful vision. Much of what it (and O'Neil) promoted should have been done by now were it possible.
O'Neill clearly wanted it to happen and let it bias his estimates. But what bothered me the most was that even if you did follow their strategy of build-powersats-in-place-out-of-extraterrestrial-materials, you could do it cheaper with workers in tin cans (and lots of automation and teleoperation) instead of livable colonies. The argument against this wasn't too convincing, but I was a teenager and figured "Hey, a lo…
I suspect the powersat evolved as a mission justification: so, we can conceive of human-habitable structures in space, but why would we do that. From Heppenheimer's book, it seems that the colony concept emerged first, then the powersat concept.
Once you've arrived at "orbiting solar power stations built from lunar regolith", questioning your premises and realizing that the colonies really don't make all that much sense. But then again, pragmatism and overt missions never really ruled space anyway -- see Apollo and the Shuttle.
As for the technical reasons, to paraphrase Douglas Adams: Space is expensive. Really expensive. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly expensive it is.
The ISS is the most expensive single structure ever constructed, and among the most expensive single projects ever undertaken -- and that for a habitation for six people. Total cost is somewhere north of $100 billion (how far north isn't clear, the budget's spread among multiple agencies and nations).
Given that, and absent tremendous gains in efficiency and automation, the cost of solar power satellites let alone O'Neil space colonies would be in the tens of trillions of dollars, minimum. That's on the scale of the entire US GDP, if not more.
As for your observation "a lot more than actually did [happen]": Colonies in Space is one of my benchmarks for rates of technological change that didn't happen. I'd anticipated that that could well be my future, but a decade and a half past when it was supposed to be a reality, it remains science fiction. It's given me a good sense of the sorts of change which are possible and likely, and those which aren't. And no, not all progress is subject to Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns.
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#39I remember some of these, which were reprinted in magazines like Odyssey (and maybe even Omni ?) in the 70s and 80s. The images, along with colony/exploration books by Larry Niven, Ben Bova, and James P. Hogan, really had the power to set one's imagination on fire.
I was so thrilled the first time I saw Babylon 5's cylinder designed. 2001's toroid design was indeed iconic, but it kind of anchored the idea of what a space station should like for several decades!
Re: Space Colony Art from the 1970s
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are both extremely difficult to accomplish with current technology. The issue with Mars is that it has no magnetosphere [1], and as such, all habitats will have to be underground and/or shielded with very thick layers of lead, dirt and water. Man made colonies will have the same problem, in addition to requiring space manufacturing and assembly at a level that is currently impossible. If SpaceX brings the cost o…
> Until we crack compact, high yield fusion, I doubt we will make much progress in realizing our space-faring dreams. What about regular, fission nuclear power?
Not enough fuel.
Projections that there's enough uranium for 200 years[1] are based on levels of present utilization: around 3.7% of global energy use[2]. Bump that to 100% and we'd run through all available reserves in less than a decade (7.4 years, if you're counting).
Solar energy (including solar mediated via plants, wind, or water), hydrogen fusion, possibly geothermal energy, or with really long odds: hydrocarbon prospecting from another body (say, maybe Titan) are the only energy sources which could last a considerable human population for the possible maximum lifetime of the species.
Yes, a small Mars outpost could be powered off of nuclear power for a considerable period, but that would take away from available nuclear fuel supplies on Earth.
The likelihood of managing usable sustainable fusion under terrestrial or other contained circumstances are fairly unlikely IMO.
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Notes:
1. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glob...