221–230 of 358 posts
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Maybe projects like this would distract us from stupid tribalism ?
Someone gets to choose who lives on these outposts.
Once can dream I guess...
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>By launching your rocket from the ballon city and returning to orbit. (I'm struggling to see the novel problem.) I believe they are having trouble envisioning how you would launch rockets from a balloon city without disturbing the equilibrium of the balloon city because it is assumed that rockets thrusting down with great force would damage the balloon city in a way it would not easily recuperate from. I also find t…
> how you would launch rockets from a balloon city without disturbing the equilibrium of the balloon city because it is assumed that rocks thrusting down with great force would damage the balloon city in a way it would not easily recuperate from It's a floating platform. Same as the ones SpaceX lands its rockets on. Same as a gunboat firing projectiles. Will a launching rocket impart force to the platform? Yes. But u…
The ww2 german "v2 in a tube towed by a U-boat so it can get closer to its target" project being a decent conceptual example of this.
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> Lots of reasons for this. The Moon is a complete hell hole - 2 week long nights, night time temperatures that drop to around -200f, daytime temperatures in excess of 250f, extremely low gravity (to the point that one might expect a higher impact of the countless health consequences of 0g exposure on humans), minimal material resources and so on. Dig a bit, and temperatures even out. Same as on Mercury. About the li…
With radical ideas it's likely that anywhere can become habitable - there have even been ideas to create floating cities in the thick atmosphere of Venus. But places that require esoteric and ever more complex solutions are obviously less desirable than those that don't. And Mars is 100% 'easy mode' in terms of our first colonization outside of Earth.
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> such a way that your inflatable balloon city comes to a gentle stop, 30 miles up, and just floats there? Literally how floating works. > Worse still, when people need to leave and return to Earth, how do you launch a rocket from the balloon city and return to orbit? By launching your rocket from the ballon city and returning to orbit. (I'm struggling to see the novel problem.) > Where are materials manufactured for…
I'm sure we can figure out stuff, but I guess my point is, why would we do that at all? How fucked up Earth needs to be than living on a floating oil platform above Venus is better? The point is already hard to make for the Moon or Mars.
Same reason North America got colonized by religious extremists and weirdos.
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> Yes, it's intangible but consider this; go back 2 centuries and ask someone if they could setup a business concern which produced millions of widgets a year. To go off on a tangent: two centuries ago was the height of the first industrial revolution (at least in Britain). The first time in history when this actually became realistic. The Industrial Revolution was the first time we had sustained, broad based product…
That is interesting. I wonder though, if not it would have been possible to build stationary steam engines with Roman tech using oversized bronze castings for cylinders. Perhaps set in bedrock to give extra strength. Weirdly though, electric generators in watermills would have been much more attainable - except nobody had any understanding of electricity.
> Weirdly though, electric generators in watermills would have been much more attainable - except nobody had any understanding of electricity.
Yes, and proper dynamos were invented only quite a long time after batteries. (So called self-excited generators.)
And you have to compare the early bad electric generators they could have come up with against the gears and shafts they knew to transmit the motive force of the water over short distance eg to the mill stone.
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> Too many dickheads with a bright idea of putting nuclear warheads on submersibles with a dead man’s switch on this planet If we're nuking each other on Earth, I find it unlikely we wouldn't aim a nuke or two at that group's colony on Mars. The only thing a Martian colony is a hedge against is ecological collapse on Earth. Because we did something exceptionally stupid accidentally. Or because a rock came by to say h…
A nuked Earth is still more habitable than Mars, even on their best day. Wouldn't it be far easier and much more useful to colonize the ocean floor than other planets? It is, after all, 70% of the surface area that just sits there.
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If you make your centrifuge big enough, it's fine. But yeah, sticking rats in a centrifuge is probably a better first step than starting with humans.
> If you make your centrifuge big enough, it's fine We don't know this! We don't know how (or even if) an embryo develops under the Coriolis force, or with a gravity gradient.
Venus is arguably the worst place in the solar system From another perspective, its atmosphere is "one of the most Earth-like in the solar system", and scientists long ago postulated the idea of establishing floating cloud cities. Big balloons filled with nitrogen and oxygen would naturally settle at the right altitude, 30 miles above the surface, where gravity, ambient pressure, and radiation aren't far off that of…
How do you deorbit Venus is such a way that your inflatable balloon city comes to a gentle stop, 30 miles up, and just floats there? Worse still, when people need to leave and return to Earth, how do you launch a rocket from the balloon city and return to orbit? How do visitors or pioneers deorbit and land at the floating city? If there aren't materials to effect a repair, how long until it sinks down into the hellzo…
Aerobraking with the balloon? A balloon the size of a city would slow down very fast in a thick atmosphere like that, then slowly descend until it reaches the stable altitude.
> Worse still, when people need to leave and return to Earth, how do you launch a rocket from the balloon city and return to orbit?
Spaceplane? Take off like a glider on a slope runway, then ignite the rocket.
> If there aren't materials to effect a repair, how long until it sinks down into the hellzone? Where are materials manufactured for repairs, and how quickly could they be manufactured and sent there?
That's a true problem. Local manufacturing would be on the surface. An elevator or cable car could make the connection to the ground facilities, if the winds aren't too strong. But the manufacturing of the materials would be extremely difficult in surface conditions.
> If a rocket is trying to land and goes off course, does it squash the balloon city like a grape?
Nope. See first answer.
> Saying that holes can be patched is well and good, but there are some truly catastrophic failure modes that don't seem entirely unlikely.
Possibly.
But the biggest question is why go there?
Venus is arguably the worst place in the solar system From another perspective, its atmosphere is "one of the most Earth-like in the solar system", and scientists long ago postulated the idea of establishing floating cloud cities. Big balloons filled with nitrogen and oxygen would naturally settle at the right altitude, 30 miles above the surface, where gravity, ambient pressure, and radiation aren't far off that of…
Living on Venus was floating around as an easier alternative to living on the Mars surface.
Room temperature is 21°C, I have no idea how many freedom fries units that is.
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And ferrous mineral recycling accounts for roughly 33% of present production (2018 data, most current available): https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-... > That's a loss of 2/3 of production to non-scrap effluvia on an annual basis. I'll let you work out the ultimate resource depletion cycle from that. Recycling is useful, but it's no magic bullet, and there are always losses. The most heavily…
That just means it's currently more economical to mine iron ore than it is to mine landfills.