Space Habitats

[magnemoe]

The Toba Catastrophe about 70000 years ago is a good benchmark of our resilience as a species. There are multiple streams of evidence that suggest that the global population of humans was reduced to about 6000 to 10000 individuals by that eruption, yet we recovered to span the planet using only stone-age technology.

Edit: I did some further reading on the Toba Catastrophe, and it seems that the idea that the Toba eruption was the cause of the apparent human population bottleneck about 60-70 thousand years ago is falling out of favor.

Something reduced the number of cheetah a lot in the same time period, so much you can freely transplant between them without fear for rejections.

For humans, something more exiting happened around 10.000 years later, first art was made, we started moving out of Africa, 30.000 years later we was most places.

My guess it was something far more local, if something in South east Asia hit Africa hard it should also hit the rest of the world.

[Anton P. Nym]

I should also point out that meteoritic encounters become more frequent as the size of the object gets smaller; rocks that can trigger ELEs on Earth come around much, much, much, much, much less frequently than rocks that can wipe out a Stanford Torus or an enclosed Martian colony. Big Sky Rocks of Doom aren't a good selling point for colonies; they're better selling points for far-IR telescope surveillance and asteroid redirect programs.

-- Steve

[magnemoe]

@Shifty: Heard of hydroponics? Doesn't use a gram of soil. And the greenhouses seen in the video clearly were hydroponic.

I don't remember saying that colonizing Mars is easy. I said it's possible.

How many people do you know that could survive in the wilderness? I know I couldn't, and I know less than a hand full of people who could. An ELE would certainly destroy our civilisation, or set it back to the bronze age. The humans alive during the Toba catastrophe were used to living in the wilderness. We aren't. Put your average joe in the jungle, and he'll be eaten by a lion by the end of the week. Same goes for a 100 average joes.

With an ELE it would not help very much if everybody had advanced wilderness experience. Simply as its so many of us that 90% would die anyway without industrial scale farming.

Would not kick us back to the bronze age, simply as its megatons of steel around, major problem after things clears up would be lack of humans to run an civilization. Would probably reach 1850 level technology with less than an generation, then go slower but faster than last time because main issue is not knowledge but lack of workers and marked.

it would not be practical for an city state to produce combiners even if they make farming far more efficient as they require factories and mass production to be economical.

"after the big catastrophe we was left with scraps, however it was plenty of instructions in various books.Stuff like steam engines was easy, more advanced things like cars required lots of parts who had to be made, even more advanced technology like microprocessors and nuclear power missed lots of instructions some items was without good explanations.

However today I think we has managed to get the same technology as our ancestors had. Activate the warp drive."

[iDan122]

Don't want to be called a Nazi, but there are only 2 options of sustaining the human kind and saving it from overpopulation and saving the Earth:

1. Stallin and Nazi policies: no more than 1 child per family, all weak people and weak babies, people with permanent health damage such as Parkinson's, retardness and Alzheimer's must be terminated. Only useful people must be left. Amost all alcochol destroyed, all tobacco and drugs terminated(everything includes production too).

More money invested carefully. Result: less people in public places, less resources consumed, pollution decreased.

All citizens become richer, everything becomes cheaper.

2. A permanent settlement on the solar systems planets and moons. Maybe even settlement on exoplanets.

Earth is no longer a terra.

About those projects, in Popular Science magazine they stated that it would be much easier to colonize the Moon and Mars than build Elysium.

[lajoswinkler]

Don't want to be called a Nazi, but there are only 2 options of sustaining the human kind and saving it from overpopulation and saving the Earth:

1. Stallin and Nazi policies: no more than 1 child per family, all weak people and weak babies, people with permanent health damage such as Parkinson's, retardness and Alzheimer's must be terminated. Only useful people must be left. Almost all alcochol destroyed, all tobacco and drugs terminated(everything includes production too).

More money invested carefully. Result: less people in public places, less resources consumed, pollution decreased.

All citizens become richer, everything becomes cheaper.

2. A permanent settlement on the solar systems planets and moons. Maybe even settlement on exoplanets.

Earth is no longer a terra.

About those projects, in Popular Science magazine they stated that it would be much easier to colonize the Moon and Mars than build Elysium.

You've forgot that humans, unlike Sims, tend to have minds. Hence all the politics, the wars, the economy.

If you put your peeps into a dystopia, you're creating a future war, no doubt about that. The solution is to educate the people. Uneducated societies are stupid societies (on the average). Educated societies grow slower, they care more about the nature and health. Average uneducated people are more prone to thinking about ****ing, drinking, eating, fighting, etc., than the average educated people.

Nobody needs to save the Earth. It's not going anywhere. We are.

[Nibb31]

Don't want to be called a Nazi, but there are only 2 options of sustaining the human kind and saving it from overpopulation and saving the Earth:

1. Stallin and Nazi policies: no more than 1 child per family, all weak people and weak babies, people with permanent health damage such as Parkinson's, retardness and Alzheimer's must be terminated. Only useful people must be left. Amost all alcochol destroyed, all tobacco and drugs terminated(everything includes production too).

More money invested carefully. Result: less people in public places, less resources consumed, pollution decreased.

All citizens become richer, everything becomes cheaper.

2. A permanent settlement on the solar systems planets and moons. Maybe even settlement on exoplanets.

Earth is no longer a terra.

About those projects, in Popular Science magazine they stated that it would be much easier to colonize the Moon and Mars than build Elysium.

You can go all Nazi, or you can just put an end to pro-natality programs and subsidies, educate populations, and make contraceptives freely available for the entire world. Bringing the world population back down to 4 or 5 billion over several decades would improve the quality of life for populations everywhere. That is a something that we could initiate now without having to wait 200 years to develop space technology. Because if we continue growing, we might not have the resources left to do anything much in 200 years.

[jwenting]

Bringing the world population back down to 4 or 5 billion over several decades would improve the quality of life for populations everywhere.

proven wrong.

But the mankind hatred and extermination attitude of the club of Rome will take decades to root out, if ever.

Of course those kids want to go further and lower our numbers to something more like 250 million worldwide, all living happy idyllic kumbaya lives in caves while wearing organic clothes woven from beaten flax, eating nuts and berries collected from what falls naturally on the ground while cowering for the storms outside.

[Nibb31]

proven wrong.

But the mankind hatred and extermination attitude of the club of Rome will take decades to root out, if ever.

Not sure where you're picking that conspiracy theory attitude.

Our planetary resources are a finite pie where 10% of the population eats half of the pie and the rest wants a larger share. Either we keep on multiplying and everyone gets a smaller share, especially those who eat the most but don't want to give up their share, or we can take measures to reduce population and everyone can keep on having a decent piece of the pie.

We can't keep on with exponential demographics forever. At one point, there will a rebalance between population and resources will be unavoidable. Either we handle it now pacifically, or the problem is going to handle itself dramatically and it won't be pretty.

You might hope that technology manages to increase the size of the pie, or that we manage to become more efficient by losing less crumbs when slicing it, but those gains will not allow the pie to grow at the same level as the world population, ie: exponentially. Au contraire, productivity and efficiency gains usually tend to follow the laws of diminishing returns. In other words, economical growth is far from following the same curve as demographic growth.

Even if population growth slows down dramatically, we will still be over 10 billion by 2040, with a majority of that population aspiring to the same standard of living as Europe or the US. Either you deny them that level of wealth and face the consequences of an increasingly unfair imbalance, or you give up a large part of your wealth so that they can have some. Either way, something is going to crack, and it won't be pretty when it does.

Sending a few thousand people into space won't make a difference. We might have the technology to deport billions of people into space in several centuries, but space colonies of that scale simply aren't an option at this point. We have to find a solution for the problem now if we don't want to face a violent reduction in population in the next century.

Of course those kids want to go further and lower our numbers to something more like 250 million worldwide, all living happy idyllic kumbaya lives in caves while wearing organic clothes woven from beaten flax, eating nuts and berries collected from what falls naturally on the ground while cowering for the storms outside.

Strawman argument and hyperbole.

[magnemoe]

However population growth world wide is falling off rapidly, most of the current growth is because the huge generation after the baby boom are having kids themselves, even if they have less than two kids, population grows as the huge grandparent generation is still alive.

As I understand most of the Arabic world and Latin America is below replacement rates.

In 50 years the main issue will be to many old people and an lack of workers.

And yes the carrying capacity of earth is around 10 million humans. Then we reached it we invented farming. Overpopulation is not an new thing, Europe was overpopulated in medieval times before the black death.

Might say world today is not overpopulated as you only have serious starvation in madmax areas like Somalia and Congo.

[Jackissimus]

I see some really dangerous attitudes in this thread. Some people in here could really benefit from visiting some of the Nazi concentration camps in Europe (and I mean this in the nicest possible way, I know I did, it's really eye-opening). Or read some Viktor Frankl.

About limits to growth - it's important to understand that Malthus was a criminal, only serving British interests in the colonies. I could write down some arguments here, but I could not put it better than the great Robert Zubrin, author of Mars Direct. What does he think about limits to growth? (read the last two questions of the Q&A)

Also by Robert Zubrin - China's one child policy.

[NGTOne]

Man, I was looking for a technical discussion of space habitat designs, not the sustainability of life on Earth...

[Nibb31]

I guess it pretty much stemmed from the question "why would we want to build gigantic space habitats in the first place?".

[NGTOne]

I never actually asked "why", though - I asked "How can these designs be made better?"

[Nibb31]

"Better" would depend on their actual purpose. The best form would depend on the requirements: function, budget and timeframe.

[magnemoe]

Man, I was looking for a technical discussion of space habitat designs, not the sustainability of life on Earth...

Main reason for building an large habitat in an orbit will be mining and/ or large scale orbital construction.

An hotel in LEO might be an exception as it could be multi purpose and used for both tourists and astronauts however it would not be habitat scale but something between an small habitat and IIS.

Would be ring sharped with an central core as its the obvious design. It would also be the design of the first actual cities, pretty much as the torus design.

However it would just be build then we needed hundreds of workers, and outside of LEO, at LEO its probably easier to just rotate crews.

[Moon Goddess]

Wow, this thread has gotten some where dark. First of all Godwin's Law once again remains true...

Ok, anyways, please remember population growth in industrialized nations is a negative number. More and more people are waiting later and later to have children, having fewer children, or not having any children.

Right now the US's population growth has been supported be immigration, and if you look at the numbers more immigrants left last year than arrived, so that's a negative number too.

This isn't cultural, this is true of any culture that industrializes due to children going from being a resource can use to work the fields into an expense you have to pay for while they go to school to learn how to do the modern jobs. It will happen to every nation at differing paces.

So yeah we'll probably hit 9 Billion in the next 50 years, but if we can get past that it will start dropping.

[TheCardinal]

I'm sorry your initial question NGTOne became so diluted to something else (even though the resulting discussion is very interesting!)

.

Back to your question.

With the current technology taken into account, i don't believe the designs are efficient enough to be realised. One of the major problems with those designs is that they rely on (almost) 100% recycling. Everything which is required at some stage has to be brought "up", as there are no harvestable resources like a colony on a planet or moon.

[NGTOne]

I'm sorry your initial question NGTOne became so diluted to something else (even though the resulting discussion is very interesting!)

.

Back to your question.

With the current technology taken into account, i don't believe the designs are efficient enough to be realised. One of the major problems with those designs is that they rely on (almost) 100% recycling. Everything which is required at some stage has to be brought "up", as there are no harvestable resources like a colony on a planet or moon.

Most of the original proposals from the '70s used the habitats as orbital construction facilities for power satellites and large interplanetary spacecraft, with infrastructure to support that construction. Think, in effect, of postwar Detroit in space - a large city, built around its manufacturing sector.

[jwenting]

Not sure where you're picking that conspiracy theory attitude.

Our planetary resources are a finite pie where 10% of the population eats half of the pie and the rest wants a larger share. Either we keep on multiplying and everyone gets a smaller share, especially those who eat the most but don't want to give up their share, or we can take measures to reduce population and everyone can keep on having a decent piece of the pie.

so far an increase in population has always led to an increase in the standard of living for that population, period.

Only idiots like the club of Rome and the radical enviromaffia claim otherwise.

Of course if those guys had their wish we'd indeed have a dramatically lower standard of living because we'd be relegated to a pre-stone age persistence farming and gathering lifestyle, something that indeed doesn't support more than a few million people worldwide.

[cypher_00]

If you want to see some more realistic spacehabs take a look at Bigelow Aerospace

We might see these kind of stations fly around 2017...

[TheCardinal]

Most of the original proposals from the '70s used the habitats as orbital construction facilities for power satellites and large interplanetary spacecraft, with infrastructure to support that construction. Think, in effect, of postwar Detroit in space - a large city, built around its manufacturing sector.

Such orbital construction facilities wouldn´t be very economic as those can be produced on earth as well. However a chemistry-medicine factory for special types of medicins could be.

[PakledHostage]

so far an increase in population has always led to an increase in the standard of living for that population, period.

[ThirdHorseman]

are these designs efficient (for a given goal of permanently, comfortably housing a large civilian population in orbit, as opposed to on the surface of a body)? If not, what improvements could be made? Are there better designs?

There are two big issues with large rotating structures like these:

1) Rotating structures require massive support systems to contain the stresses involved. They are going to require an enormous amount of material to construct, and for what? We assume we need artificial gravity, but I believe we can do without it. You go through all this work to get into space, to escape gravity, just to subject yourself to gravity? There are plenty of options to avoid the health ramifications, and the health and psychological benefits are huge. I say leave gravity for the land lubbers.

2) There have been plenty of studies to show that the artificial gravity generated by rotating structures is NOT as great as previously expected. Between the disorienting effects of the Coriolis forces and gravity gradients, you must have very low rotational period and very long diameters, which drastically increase the design requirements of the habitat. This link has some interesting information ARTIFICIAL GRAVITY

I have been a huge proponent of Marshall Savage's ideas for many years. Everyone who has any interest in space should read The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps. While some of the ideas are outdated, or have been shown to include calculation errors, the overall ideas are great for inspiration.

He proposes a massive bubble habitat with smaller bubble modules nested within, the entire thing shielded with a water shield that is used both as a radiation barrier and an environment for growing algae:

Larger Image

As for the why, space habitats are a stepping stone. It's way too hard to keep moving stuff up the gravity well, so by having manufacturing/processing facilities in high orbit it makes it much easier to move out into the solar system.

As an aside, he also had great ideas for the terraforming of Mars (which he called "Elysium"). Smash a few large comets into the polar regions, which will release megatons of water vapor into the air to thicken up the atmosphere. Presto, new planet!

[Kryten]

Of course if those guys had their wish we'd indeed have a dramatically lower standard of living because we'd be relegated to a pre-stone age persistence farming and gathering lifestyle, something that indeed doesn't support more than a few million people worldwide.

I don't suppose you've got relatives in the Hebrides?

[ThirdHorseman]

Such orbital construction facilities wouldn´t be very economic as those can be produced on earth as well. However a chemistry-medicine factory for special types of medicins could be.

I disagree with that. It takes a hell of a lot of work to get stuff into orbit, especially people. KSP teaches that more than anything! Much better to have facilities in orbit that can manufacture what you need using materials harvested from space sources (asteroids, moon regolith, etc). Or just launch raw materials into orbit, which have higher tolerances and thus can be launched cheaper and easier than delicate instruments and organics.