unlese both space x and blue origin sents there astronaunts to mars lol
unlese both space x and blue origin sents there astronaunts to mars lol
maybe but I don't see what the economic case for Mars is. It's far away, doesn't have earth gravity, going there is realistically a one-way trip for most.
There is Phobos and Demos, which are basically really big asteroids and could be useful. So maybe being AROUND Mars is useful.
I agree they would be useful as staging points.
However, they would be small for asteroids - being only of the order of ten to twenty kilometres across. Ceres, the largest asteroid, is just under a thousand kilometres in diameter.
If you add up the mass of all the asteroids, including Ceres, in the solar system, it comes to only 4% of the mass of the Moon. The Moon itself is only 1.25% the mass of the Earth, so the asteroids total one two-thousandth of the Earth's mass.
Not very impressive, although I suppose any useful elements would be easier to access.
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Right. A rocky world like Earth is mostly iron. We've been doing perfectly fine with the iron that we just scratch the surface to get. Civilization could and did run on mostly bog-iron before that. But the rarer metals should be easier to get in the asteroids and you dont' need that many, comparatively.
Asteroids are also an easier way to get at the building materials for space habitats, even those with low iron content can be used to make the radiation shielding etc.
Automate the whole thing by using mining robots/drones and you can do it all from Earth and move into a habitat when it's done.
Automate the whole thing by using mining robots/drones and you can do it all from Earth and move into a habitat when it's done.
Dandridge Cole envisioned something along these lines.
Note that the lake has a cylindrical configuration.
I think these images may have inspired the novel Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke.
Freeman Dyson proposed the tethering together of cometary nuclei to form space colonies in the Kuiper Belt: https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/97nov/space.htm
Sci-fi writer Michael McCollum proposed the colonization of gas giant planets using cities suspended from hot hydrogen aerostats in his 1991 novel “The Clouds of Saturn”: https://www.cosmographica.com/space...uturism/index.html#img=265-Saturnian-City.jpg
Sci-fi writer Michael McCollum proposed the colonization of gas giant planets using cities suspended from hot hydrogen aerostats in his 1991 novel “The Clouds of Saturn”: https://www.cosmographica.com/space...uturism/index.html#img=265-Saturnian-City.jpg
“Mars, the focus of so many hopeful dreams, might be bypassed. It will see its research centers for geology and other studies, but it appears to have few resources which cannot be had elsewhere. Even if it did, its gravity would make it costly to lift them out. Its atmosphere is just thick enough to prevent the use of a mass-driver. Yet the atmosphere is too thin to screen the solar ultraviolet or permit the use of aircraft for transportation. Mars of the great volcanoes, Mars of the deserts, of the frosty nights and the whistling winds in the canyons—if it is to be colonized, it will be done as an afterthought in the history of the human reach into space. It may remain a vast dry land, far from the major centers of commerce or population, thinly populated and of interest mainly to the people that live there. Mars may be the Australia of future centuries.” - “Colonies in Space” by Thomas A. Heppenheimer (Stackpole Books, 1977)
I love that book. Was very formative to me as a child.
If Mars is Australia, perhaps we should send all the criminals there - Musk included. What Heppenheimer doesn't mention in that quotation is the possibility of terraforming. Of course, that makes mass drivers even less practicable, but not everyone wants those. A thicker atmosphere would make delivery of resources from the asteroids much easier. Colonising Ceres would be easier, but would we really try to spin it up just to live in a claustrophobia inducing maze of twisty passages and cell-like rooms without windows onto a real plantary vista? Space habitats are doable, but, for any given individual, the existential risk of living on one is perhaps several orders of magnitude higher than living down a gravity well.
There may be an intermediate step between zero g space stations, and Cole/O'Neill habitats.
Tracked Centrifuge[url].
Tracked Centrifuge[url].
Living in a space habitat: no violent local weather, you can maneuver away from deadly comets and meteors. Pandemic in the rest of the solar system? Lock all hatches. solar storms are a problem, but you're also more likely to have your infrastructure properly built withstand them. You do have to really pay attention to maintenance. It won't be a culture that can allow itself to go into decline just because one really large generation is aging out and doesn't give a shit about the next ones.
Space Colonization Options (Orbiting Stations, planets/moons)
with that amount of firepower you’d cause more damage pointing it at a city or the ground station. The falling panels were not a intentional Terrorist Attack, it was the side effect of one where the
www.trekbbs.com
Well, we won't know until we try it. I suspect humans will just bring their old problems along with them.
I've always assumed that you don't stop building new habitats, as soon you move into one you're already starting to build the next one and improve on everything as much you can, as for bringing old flaws into it, I assume that after a few generations it will have sunk in that if you make a mess you will die a horrible death in a unforgiving environment, with that in the back of your head you probably will make sure that old problems will be less a problem.
Also, a habitat is of course much smaller than a planet so more manageble I assume, easier to educate people etc.
Also, a habitat is of course much smaller than a planet so more manageble I assume, easier to educate people etc.
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