How the hell do we leave Earth?

[Hicks]

I am so pissed at the history channel's "Universe" series, specifically the colonization episode. To sum up 20 minuites of my speen trying to digest itself in rage: we should colonize other planets... because! They give no answer, except "mankind's journy of discovery" and "because it's cool". Hell's bells, they had a quote from a scientist that said that "we should be a two planet species..." because "Earth could be destroyed".
And then they go on about colonizing Mars, of all the solar system's ass-holes, why Mars? It is compleatly undefended from solar flares because it has no magnetic field. Mars' core is D-E-D; solid and inactive. Going to Mars is like going to the Moon, walk outside without a space suit on and you die and you still have to bury the colony to not die from solar storms, except that it takes longer to get there.
And that pisses me the hell off! I got to sit down and watch the history channel tell me that the most advenced, bleeding edge state of the art space ship that we can muster, the Ares IV, is a fucking chemical rocket! It can do it in 6 months in a God-damn Holman transfer when we've been sitting on the Orion's technology for over 40 years, and Nuclear Rockets for over 50.

---

Now, I know how I could lift us and keep us out to as far as the Moon using a simple four step PLAN:

• 1: MONEY
  The only reason why anybody is going to do anything in any meaningful fashion is money, forcing an economic imperitive that makes people want to do simething, so the Idea is solar POWER SATELLITES: 100% clean energy from when they are set up untill the sun goes all "red giant" in about 5 billion years, we bottle it up in a microwave beam and send it to recieving stations on earth that sell the power for shineys. They (POWER SATELLITES) need to be huge, because I said so. Seriously like 10s of kilometers accross. And we're gonna build a whole bunch of them. Doing so is a logisical nightmare if you plan on boosting that shit from earth to synchronous orbit, and waaaay to fuckin' expensive. So instead we're gonna build a STARSHIP to found a MOON COLONY that builds the POWER SATELLITES, savy?
  
  2: STARSHIP
  We are going to build a STARSHIP to move shit around in space. It will be kick-ass, because I said so; your horseshit chemical rockets can't join our "No Homers Club". They can join the "LEO bitch movers" club, until the Liberty Ship gets built, then they can get bent. Check out those 40 and 50 year old rockets to see what this is gonna be. The STARSHIP(s) are to move the men and materials to set up the MOON COLONY, located on the mother-fucking Moon.
  
  3: MOON COLONY
  There is no fucking way those POWER SATELLITES are ever going to be boosted from earth, ever. You gotta mine the shit out out of the Moon, build them, then push them with your STARSHIPS into geo-synchronous orbit. These POWER SATELLITES are gonna be big, and you gotta mine the metal, work it and build those fuckers in sections on the moon, and that is gonna take people. Miners, smelters, heavy industry, manufacturing, electronics- all that shit takes people, and then you gotta feed them, so add hydroponic farmers to the list. And these people have to stay on the moon to do their jobs, and that means they want stuff. That means they're gonna spend their shines on a moonuler* economy, and before you know it you have a service industry, in space. All this to get to the big payoff.
  
  4: POWER SATELLITES
  This is the whole fucking point. To get here you need a thriving MOON COLONY to make them, and a small fleet of STARSHIPS to move them into position. You can now make MONEY by providing power, [/i]anywhere on Earth[/i], no matter how remote, uplifting the citizens of the world with the power of electricity. McDonalds, Walmarts, and economical/cultural sublimation to follow.

*

Moonuler
Main Entry: Moon·u·ler
Pronunciation: ˈmün-ü-lər
Function: adjective
Date: This Post
1 : of, relating to, or constituting the mother-fucking Moon.

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Naturally, the POWER SATELLITES, STARSHIPS, MOON COLONY, and MONEY need to be defended to prevent people from breaking your shit and taking it away, which necessitates the need of an armed security force capable of stopping the seizure of ground installations and the MOON COLONY in misguided nationalization attempts, and for the STARSHIPS and POWER SATELLITES to be tricked out with lasers to defend against missile attacks. Of course hilarity ensues when people realize that you now have the ultimate high ground and actually get to pull the rocks fall everyone dies stunt.

---

Now that the tirade is over, I need a reason to go to the other planets, besides the standard "for the lols". Europa has water and Titan has atmosphere, but neither has an actual economic imperitive for a human presence that I can think of. Any ideas?

As an aside, the PLAN falls apart if we ever harness fusion power, because then there is no reason for the POWER SATELLITES cuz you could get 99.9% clean energy for the next 5 billion years and bounce a microwave beam off a satellite to a reciever station anywhere in the world. I know. Ironically, I believe that if we harness fusion power, Humanity will never have a reason to expand beyond Earth for the next 5 billion years.

[tzor]

First and foremost, most people have been wildly speculating about space for the past few centuries and most “scientific” papers on the subject have generally ignored the fundamental principles that drove the colonization that they model space colonization on. Simply put, there is no fundamental resource in space that is currently not available on earth. The colonization of the “New World” was inspired by Asian spices, incubated on relatively free gold supplies and finally developed through simple raw materials, including lumber, that was not available in the over harvested lands of Europe in the quantities necessary to maintain large naval fleets.

Secondly, barring a strange event, the space age is winding to a close. Unmanned exploration of the outer solar system and beyond will cease within a decade; a testament to the end of the cold war and the fact that currently only Pu238 has the ability to power vessels that leave the effective distance from the sun where solar power is viable. There is little enthusiasm for manned exploration and almost none for an Apollo type mission where there the costs are high and the chances for fatalities are high (space is no longer the domain of dare devil test pilots who looked at death as a necessary risk for advancement).

We will also be lacking in the fundamental means to get next generation platforms into space. We still don’t have a heavy lift system and there is nothing even in the drawing board state. Space shuttle technology (light lift at best) is winding down and who knows how long old Soviet Union technology can keep up with light to medium cargo requirements to low earth orbit.

Technology aside (seriously we should be at the point where simple high orbit satellite repairs should be trivial and we are not; there has been no significant improvement since the space shuttle) there is still the fundamental problem that there is no financial incentive for us to colonize space. Why aren’t all these “global warming” billionaires working on an L5 solar array project which could eliminate the use of all fossil fuels worldwide? (Oh yea, I forgot, because “global warming” billionaires” don’t really want to solve the problem, only enslave the world in their bureaucracy.)

In the back of my head, I’m still convinced that 0-G metallurgy might be the breakthrough that will push technology in the late 21st century. Because of gravity, you can’t make alloys of light and dense metals, such as aluminum and lead. You probably have to go beyond microgravity to get the really interesting alloys.

But again, at the present moment, neither is practical and no one is going to play the role of the mule on the logical psycho-historic view of the death of the space program. My lunar retirement community will never be built and my lifelong dream of celebrating my 80th birthday at the L5 community’s 0-G sex suite for older couples will never happen.

[Kaelik]

Fucking A, you know that the International Space Station is going to be fucking unfunded and crash into the ocean somewhere relatively damn soon right?

[Surgo]

Why aren’t all these “global warming” billionaires working on an L5 solar array project which could eliminate the use of all fossil fuels worldwide? (Oh yea, I forgot, because “global warming” billionaires” don’t really want to solve the problem, only enslave the world in their bureaucracy.)

From what I'm given to understand, cableless power transmission also sucks.

[tzor]

From what I'm given to understand, cableless power transmission also sucks.

I'm convinced that if we put our heads together, we can easily come up with a material that is 100% opaque to neutrinos, (that doesn’t involve large quantities of gallium). This has the added advantage that we don’t need to “distribute” the power from the L5 grid as the beams could go straight through the atmosphere and the earth without any power loss.

(By the way, we now have a material that uses carbon nanotubes that only reflect 0.045% of the light back. The potential for power from even the Earth/Moon L5 point is massive. If you take it to the next level and start considering what we could develop from the Earth/Sun L5 points a century or two from now, people may look back at the 21st century as the “dark ages.”)

[CatharzGodfoot]

It can do it in 6 months in a God-damn Holman transfer when we've been sitting on the Orion's technology for over 40 years, and Nuclear Rockets for over 50.

Nuclear rockets are hard to design. So hard, in fact, that there haven't been any that have a good chance of working (I say this from the perspective of someone who has read about the challenges but doesn't know the physics). And Orion-type spacecraft would probably work, but is too politically unpalatable for a lot of reasons. The only situation under which we would actually build such a craft is to deflect a large asteroid (the perceived danger of 'nukes in space' is less than the asteroid).

And, yeah, manned space exploration is probably a dead end. The only situation where colonization would become possible is if we end up with an absurd excess of both energy and population, such that the additional space outweighs the absurd cost. My hope is that some kind of 'Dyson chicken' project gets off the ground.

[Edit]

And Tzor, what's the problem with neutrinos? They're non-interacting.

[Username17]

I'm convinced that if we put our heads together, we can easily come up with a material that is 100% opaque to neutrinos

You know Tzor, this is actually much crazier than your rants about communist brown shirt Obamanationalists. The entire Earth, and yes I mean the entire planet only stops about a third of 1% of the neutrinos that pass through it.

If we could build a material that stopped 100% of the Neutrinos, it would basically be white hot all the time, and we could use its mere presence instead of coal fire. We would have what is essentially limitless free energy no matter where we stuck it for the next 8 billion years or so. To that I say what the fuck are you smoking? I mean honestly, if we had something retarded like that, we sure as fuck wouldn't need to transmit any power from space.

The big problem with space based generation is that you have to get the power back to Earth and then transform it into something usable. And now we're basically at the "why don't we just put a giant solar farm in the middle of the Australian outback?" - Power lines, sadly, don't really work that well once asked to go beyond disappointingly short distances.

So basically you're back to putting power sats in the Clarke Belt, beaming the power down to floating hydrolysis devices that make hydrogen. Hydrogen that we then bottle and ship to power plants actually near cities where it can be burned and then with disappointingly low tech: heat water and have the expansion drive electric turbines that power cities.

I seriously don't know what the fuck help you think parking in L5 is going to be. It maintains equal relative distance with Earth and the Sun, but the Earth still spins and wobbles, so any beams you sent back would seriously hit essentially random parts of the Earth.

-Username17

[Gelare]

Out of curiosity, how are we going to prevent these ten kilometer-wide solar cells from getting turned into swiss cheese by random space debris? I know space is big, but I'm under the impression that there's nevertheless quite a bit of junk up there.

[shau]

Why aren’t all these “global warming” billionaires working on an L5 solar array project which could eliminate the use of all fossil fuels worldwide? (Oh yea, I forgot, because “global warming” billionaires” don’t really want to solve the problem, only enslave the world in their bureaucracy.)

Shit, tzor's onto us.

Secret Global Warming Plan

1. Secretly bribe people into believing a myth about global warming. By necessity, this will require pulling most of the world's scinetists into the conspiracy.
2. Covertly effect the world so that we can point to signs of global warming. (BTW, as a member of the conspiracy I have spent every Sunday for the last four years removing snow from the top of Mount Kilimanjaro.)
3. Push for reforms like a cap and trade program.
4. ?????
5. Repeal of the Thirteenth Amendment.

[tzor]

You know Tzor, this is actually much crazier than your rants about communist brown shirt Obamanationalists. The entire Earth, and yes I mean the entire planet only stops about a third of 1% of the neutrinos that pass through it.

The sun sends enormous numbers of neutrinos in all directions. Every second, about 65 billion (6.5×1010) solar neutrinos pass through every square centimeter on Earth that faces the sun. Since neutrinos are insignificantly absorbed by the mass of the Earth, the surface area on the side of the Earth opposite the Sun receives about the same number of neutrinos as the side facing the Sun.

Note that I am not considering using neutrinos from the sun. While they are many in number, the energy of such solar neutrinos is extremely small. About 3 percent of the total energy radiated by the sun is in the form of neutrinos. This is clearly not a significant source of power. More over, because of neutrino oscillations not all of the neutrinos are of the same type that could be easily detected from one simple detector.

Instead neutrinos would be used as a transmission media. High energy neutrinos would be generated at the solar collector and beamed safely to earth, reacting only with the neutrino collectors set to the specific neutrinos generated by the generator (possibly a muon collider) such high energy beams might be even be detectable on astronomical distances and there has been SETI like proposals for neutrino detectors like the IceCube (The paper is Silagadze, “SETI and muon collider,” Acta Physica Polonica B39 (2008), pp. 2943-2948 (available online).)

Thus a combination of muon collider neutrino generator combined with a effective detector would provide the “greenest” form of energy transmission we can currently dream up.

[Cielingcat]

About 3 percent of the total energy radiated by the sun is in the form of neutrinos. This is clearly not a significant source of power.

Are you fucking kidding me? Three percent of a STAR's output is "not a significant source of power"? Put down the fucking crackpipe-the sun outputs more energy in a day than we could ever use ever. And even three percent of that is impossibly huge.

[tzor]

Out of curiosity, how are we going to prevent these ten kilometer-wide solar cells from getting turned into swiss cheese by random space debris? I know space is big, but I'm under the impression that there's nevertheless quite a bit of junk up there.

The solar wind is a major factor in the inner solar system, but one option is not to worry about damage at all, if you can easily create an effective system using carbon nanotubes then you could design it as a window shade design, constantly rolling out new sections and then recycling the old damaged sections at the other end of the frame.

[tzor]

Are you fucking kidding me? Three percent of a STAR's output is "not a significant source of power"? Put down the fucking crackpipe-the sun outputs more energy in a day than we could ever use ever. And even three percent of that is impossibly huge.

The original comment was to Frank's "it would basically be white hot all the time." If you consider that these collectors would be damn expensive to build they are not going to cover much area. Conventional solar collectors that can capture 99% of the normal solar energy would still vastly outperform a solar neutrino capture system that is only collecting 3% and must, by its very nature, be far smaller.

[CatharzGodfoot]

That is a neat idea. Non-interacting particles would be pretty damn' difficult to interfere with.

[Hicks]

Out of curiosity, how are we going to prevent these ten kilometer-wide solar cells from getting turned into swiss cheese by random space debris? I know space is big, but I'm under the impression that there's nevertheless quite a bit of junk up there.

Space is big. Like, recockulously big. And the ammount of sheer volume exponentionally increases the farther you get from the earth.

• 1. The bulk of what is in orbit is in Low Earth Orbit, because it is cheaper to boost a satellite there, likewise medium earth orbit (where the GPS hang out) is still 30,000 kilometers from where the solar POWER SATELLITES are gonna be placed. anything below 35,000 kilometers poses no danger, so this does not apply.
  
  2. Big ass solar POWER SATELLITES can only be feasible if placed in Geo-Synchronous Orbit because building giant rectennas twice is stupid if you can avoid it. L5 point power satellites that convert solar energy into microwaves to hit a geosynchronous rectenna that transformes the microwaves into electricity, then back into microwaves to be sent to a ground based rectenna that you actually hook up power lines to is too much. It decreases the efficiency of the system while increasing the cost without improving overall power generation all for the wonderful nut punch of increasing the project time table with an unnecessary step, as opposes to if you just put another (in actuality, many) solar POWER SATELLITE in geosynchronous orbit to account for when one or two are covered by the Earth's shadow.
  
  3. They have to be manned. Yes, they will be damaged by micrometeorite impacts. It's a fact of life. You have to repair that shit and upgrade the photvoltics as higher efficiencies present themselvels for installation. But a micrometeorite or even a the fucking international space station (as implasuable as that is) blasting through a 10x10 kilometer POWER SATELLITE is not going to seriously affect the power output of something over 100,000 times its size.

---

Nuclear rockets are hard to design.

No, they are banned by treaty. Now nuclear lightbulb rockets are hard to build (but still banned), but the PLAN had a provision for shitty chemical rockets until gas core nuclear rocket technology catches up. This all means that a corporation must make them in a country that did not sign the "Nuclear Test Ban Treaty" of 1963. I have no faith in NASA: Scientific discovery is a bullshit reason that has proven that it can't hold national interest to pull a bullshit budget. Economic Imperitive is the only way to get things done; everyone talks, money walks.

[Username17]

Why would you put power sats in geosynchronous orbit when you could put them in geostationary orbit instead?

-Username17

[Hicks]

Ugh... it should have been geostationary orbit from the start... /oops.

[Murtak]

Economic Imperitive is the only way to get things done; everyone talks, money walks.

Which is of course why fundamental research is done by corporations, right?

[Meikle641]

I can't seem to find the link, but I saw an article the other day talking about a "new" way to propel stuff faster to other planets. Or at least use less fuel.

Basically some scientist found old theories about something called (I think) two-stage something or other. Boost the ship to something like the moon, then use orbit to sling shot it further or something. It was written in the 20s, and apparently was forgotten until now.

Supposedly it could decrease the time to Mars considerably (or allow for larger payloads for same fuel).

[Meikle641]

I seriously don't know what the fuck help you think parking in L5 is going to be. It maintains equal relative distance with Earth and the Sun, but the Earth still spins and wobbles, so any beams you sent back would seriously hit essentially random parts of the Earth.

Dude, we can have a giant ray of doom. Awesome.

[Koumei]

Reminds me of Sim City 2, where you had the microwave power plants with the drawback "Sometimes the heat rays miss the dish and set a city block on fire".

[Sock Puppet]

Reminds me of Sim City 2, where you had the microwave power plants with the drawback "Sometimes the heat rays miss the dish and set a city block on fire".

Drawback? Hell no, it was a bonus! The best part about SimCity was spending hours or even days building an elaborate, beautifully integrated city-system and then BURNING IT TO THE GROUND. And the designers knew that was the fun part, too, what with all the disasters that were built into it like volcanoes, earthquakes, plane crashes, etc. Murdering Sims by the thousands is just plain good fun. That's not at all misanthropic, is it? No, not at all.

[Heath Robinson]

I can't seem to find the link, but I saw an article the other day talking about a "new" way to propel stuff faster to other planets. Or at least use less fuel.

Basically some scientist found old theories about something called (I think) two-stage something or other. Boost the ship to something like the moon, then use orbit to sling shot it further or something. It was written in the 20s, and apparently was forgotten until now.

Supposedly it could decrease the time to Mars considerably (or allow for larger payloads for same fuel).

Orbital slingshots have been used extensively by NASA to send the probes we used to analyse the farther planets, and even for that probe we intentionally sent outside the solar system. They use less fuel, but take far longer, so no human occupied vessel would use them.

Also, the Inplanetary Transport Network will reduce your fuel expenditure to nearly zero, but it'll take years to get anywhere. It's an envelope where the gravitational pulls of all the planets (and the sun) cancel out to pull you towards another point inside the envelope. Essentially you steal tiny bits of momentum from the entire solar system to get yourself wherever you want.

[tzor]

Which is of course why fundamental research is done by corporations, right?

That is absolutely correct. (Note it takes a special type of corporation as research money does against the grain of some corporate board mentalities.) Bell Labs was the best example of this type of intensive fundamental research. IBM is another example of this type of intensive fundamental research. The National Synchrotron Light Source, (Brookhaven National Laboratory) in Upton NY near where I live and where my father used to work, (he actually worked for the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron there) has a number of corporate users at the facility.

[Murtak]

So how many corporations are doing research into, say, quantum physics? Heck, how many nuclear power companions are researching fusion technology? And even if they were, do you think they would share their discoveries for the good of humankind? Or would they keep it secret as long as they can, then bury their discoveries under a mountain of patents, then sue the shit out of anyone even tangentially related?

Heck just look at your examples. You name two (at the time) monopolists and a national facility. Meanwhile who is researching nanotechnology, cybertechnology and going into space? At best the private sector is good for refining existing technology. At worst they are actively hindering research.