41–50 of 59 posts
I 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.
The cylindrical colony is basically Arthur C Clarke's Rama . One of the images of the spherical colony shows a human-powered vehicle, which IIRC featured in the first Rama book.
OMG, so this is where the Elysium creators got their inspiration from! Elysium art: http://actionflickchick.com/superaction/wp-content/uploads/2... http://www.geeksofdoom.com/GoD/img/2013/08/2013-08-09-elysiu...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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: hydrocarb…
OMG, so this is where the Elysium creators got their inspiration from! Elysium art: http://actionflickchick.com/superaction/wp-content/uploads/2... http://www.geeksofdoom.com/GoD/img/2013/08/2013-08-09-elysiu...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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: hydrocarb…
Many 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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: hydrocarb…
Liquid thorium reactors are another option. There's no thorium in seawater, but on land there's several times as much thorium as U238, and it's all the same, useful isotope. China has an aggressive R&D program hoping to get a prototype reactor ready in a decade.
But personally I think it's likely that we will achieve sustainable fusion in the fairly near future.
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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 se…
Indeed, we may be in Vinge's "Age of failed dreams".
DISCO WILL NEVER DIE!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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: hydrocarb…
The fuel supply for conventional reactors is limited because they rely on U235, which is 0.7% of uranium. Fast reactors could use the rest of the uranium. That multiplies the supply by more than 100x because it means you can economically retrieve fuel from lower-grade ore, or even from seawater, which would extend the supply to millions of years. Russia has several fast reactors in production right now, and is buildi…