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by vbezhenar
1597 days ago
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That's why it makes no sense to build something big by lifting heavy things from the Earth. Just mine asteroids, extract iron, melt it into chunks, then transport those chunks very slowly but with huge throughput from asteroids to the necessary building site in space and use them to build space ship. You can melt iron just by focusing enough sun light and you can build ships closer to sun for cheaper sun light. It's imaginable with current technologies, we just need industry to move into space. Imagine that with all your knowledge you suddenly moved to the ancient times. You know how to make CPU but you can't even make a shovel because iron production is not there. You need to spend enormous amount of time and efforts to build all the industries required to build a factory to produce simple resistor. That's where we at when it comes to space right now. We need to spend lots of time and effort to build space industry. But once it's there, space ships will not be a big deal. |
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And earlier, this: https://pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html https://pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventur...
Still think it is all a good idea. Glad the "maker" movement is making some progress in that area. As I noted on the LibrePlanet mailing list a few weeks ago: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/2022-...
Someday after I "retire" I hope to have more time to work on all that.
Tangentially, on a super earth with more gravity, they would have an easier time going into orbit energetically using mass drivers or laser launch systems instead of rockets. And in any case, how big a seed do you really need to make a space infrastructure if you are patient? And the ground can communicate to space with radio or lasers (like for telepresence) which are not affected much by planetary gravity even for super earths.