Wait till you hear about Ring Worlds
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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I like science fiction but have never heard of this book. However, it reminds me of the Halo game series.
That's not by coincidence.
I don't understand the obsession with colonizing other planets. The Earth's gravity well is by far the greatest obstacle on our way to the stars. It makes absolutely no sense to me to finally claw our way out of one gravity well only to immediately descend into another one. The asteroids have all the raw materials we need, we should be focusing on zero-g industry and habitats.
Being in orbit is difficult because it's very hard to be self sustaining, but if you were on a small moon for example, you'd have enough resources for fuel, water, nutrients etc. but also having a low gravity which makes building shit easy.
The only problem I see with deorbiting is the human body, because low gravity fucks it up (I don't see this problem in orbit, because of centrifuges, but I don't think that would be a good solution on planet or on a moon).
One solution could be having wheights on your body to make yourself heavier so that you have the same force on the ground like on earth, but I don't know that this would fix the whole bone structure problem, because the wheights would have to be located around your body and probably not inside your body. (Because of this the forces between your inside could maybe be different)
Overall with living in space or in low gravity, we probably will have to exercise a lot for the next time.
If we even make it that far...
You could totally do a centrifuge on a moon/planet surface, you'd just make it a funnel shape rather than a cylinder; the downward gravity of the celestial body combined with the outward centrifugal force would combine into artificial gravity perpendicular to the angled surface. But I have a feeling we're going to get rid of our organic bodies long before our space colonization efforts reach a level where such solutions would be necessary. Brain-computer interfaces are already being worked on, and we're able to replace a variety of vital organs with machines even with our current tech. Once we can turn ourselves into brains in jars that can plug into a variety of robotic bodies, life support and logistics in space are going to become dramatically simpler and easier.
The problem I have about centrifuges on planets is not the realisation in a sense of how we build it, but the logistics with it, because a centrifuge is big and circular, and you can't expand it that well because of multiple reasons (we'll assume that the centrifuges would be build like you said, perpendicular to the force of gravity):
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If you install a centrifuge that is a small ring, which is in this thought a cylinder with a circular hole in it, you can not expand one circle directly, because they have a fixed size, but there is a solution: stacking these rings. With that you can expand one circle, by adding "copies" of itself on top of it. To avoid just having a very big cylinder, you can tilt every new cylinder by some small amount, so that if you combine a lot of them you get a thorus.
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But even with that you waste so much building space, because circular shapes are a pain to store, so this solution would be inefficient.
To solve this, you could build a city on a moon or planet with lower gravity by adding hexagonal tiles to the surface and building simelar towers on this. With that you'll be using nearly 100% of the space, but this makes centrifuges much more harder.
This is the first thing you mentioned, and adding to what you said after that I just want to tell you, that Transhumanism probably won't happen in our time.
Maybe, but probably not, especially with everything happening around us: climate change, possible war with nuclear holocaust, not being careful with AI, etc.
I just want to tell you, that Transhumanism probably won’t happen in our time.
Neither will the large-scale colonization of other planets. Sure, we'll build small research outposts, probably some Helium-3 mines on the moon to power fusion reactors back home. But cities on other planets? Hell no. Old sci-fi was wrong. They used to think we'd be on Mars by the year 2000, in reality we even gave up on the moon. The kind of huge engineering we used to envision is way too expensive and pointless. There's nothing on Mars that Earth doesn't have, so why bother? Instead, we're focusing on 'small' technologies like medicine, computers, AI. I don't see us expanding beyond our planet in a major way until these small technologies eliminate the need for those large-scale engineering projects.
Correct, though Mercury might be a better candidate for space quarry than the asteroid belt in the long term.
Orbital habitats are so much more space-efficient, it's not even a competition.