james_nicoll ([info]james_nicoll) wrote,
@ 2009-05-21 11:20:00
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Entry tags:space colonies

Space Colonies: Vision: Appendix
APPENDIX

This is what it says on the label. There are still some points of interest.



Authors: Tsiolkowsky in Russia, Bernal in England, and Cole in the U.S.A. all wrote books which bear on the concept of space colonies. Clarke, Stroud and others have also considered portions of the problem.

Tsiolkovsky is the father of astronautics (He seems not to have enjoyed much publication in English that I can find). Bernal was a pioneer in the field of X-ray crystallography (and someone whose politics led him in unfortunate directions) but the author is probably referring to The World, the Flesh & the Devil. Dandridge Cole was an engineer and futurist who wrote such works as Islands in Space: The Challenge of the Planetoids, (with Donald W. Cox) [1] but his contributions to this topic of discussion were limited by his death at age 44. Clarke is Arthur C. and I assume I don't have to explain his connection to this discussion. I have no idea who Stroud is.

A discussion of Islands in Space can be found here.

I wonder how much of my interest in this sort of thing has been driven by illustrations such as this? I wonder what that guy is pointing at?

Niven fans will note the similarity between this illustration and the habitat the Belters created so they'd have a place where women could bring kids to term (In Known Space, free fall + pregnancy = Very Bad Outcome).

Bearing forces are small, typically one ten-millionth of colony weight in one gravity.

Speaking of bearings, I've always been a bit nervous about the potential for disaster in designs that have spin-decouplers.

The goal is apparently to minimize transport costs by building cities near asteroids and then moving the cities to their final destination over the course of a generation or more. This would seem to require asteroids rich in everything a city needs. It also raises the interesting idea of what I will call for lack of a better term cities in flight, where entire communities can migrate to where the economic action is (The time scales involved may make this less than entirely effective).

Huh. Does O'Neill never discuss mass ratios? He could make the case for off-Earth resources look even better if he did that (A hydrogen/oxygen rocket could in theory produce a delta vee of 10 km/s with a mass ratio of 12. It could produce a delta vee of 2.5 km/s with a mass ratio of 1.9). He seems to be determined to avoid the apparent inefficiencies of rockets by using fixed accelerators where possible.

In PTA an estimate of 10,000 tons for lift-needs from earth to L5 was given, and 3,000 tons for transfer from the earth to the moon [...]

That would run about $6.5 billion dollars if the shuttle had actually been able to deliver material to space at $500.00 a kilo. I think the actual cost is something like 20-40 times that.

The structural aluminum considered for use in colony-building is an alloy of aluminum and silicon, the most plentiful of lunar elements after oxygen.

I assume lunar aluminum is bound with oxygen? So there will be a considerable need for electrical generation on the Moon in this scheme.

D. Criswell (ref. 5) has calculated the yields of carbon nitrogen and hydrogen which could be obtained by sifting lunar soils for the finegrained material, and then heating that material.

I'd be curious what the energy cost per kilogram of that was.

Vehicle development costs: for an advanced (non-shuttle-derived) heavy lift vehicle, estimates of development cost from within the aerospace industry vary from 5 billion dollars to 25 billion dollars; of attainable launch costs to geosynchronous, from $77/Kg to $400/Kg.

Unfortunately this was a gross underestimate.

One area requiring verification is semi-closed-cycle ecology. Many small islands have effective ecosystems more limited than that of the first colony, but verification is still required.

Any biologists care to comment on this?




1: I own this and could review it. I see a reference from Cole's grandson to an online version but I have not stumbled across that edition yet.



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Small islands
(Anonymous)
2009-05-21 04:34 pm UTC (link)
depends on how you define "small", "effective" and "ecosystem". There are inhabited atolls just a few hectares in size, but the inhabitants are getting most of their calories from the sea, not the land.

In nature, it actually takes a pretty large island -- a few hundred square km. minimum -- to support human-sized omnivores. Obviously intensive agriculture and management reduces that considerably, but we're still talking square kilometers.

Note that small islands are not closed ecosystems, as they're getting their air and water from outside.


Doug M.

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Re: Small islands
[info]anzhalyumitethe
2009-05-21 04:50 pm UTC (link)
It would be an interesting challenge to try to make this work: closed ecosystem that is. However, IDK what the status of the related tech development. Biosphere 2 kinda put a cloud over the whole thing from what I gather.

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Re: Small islands
[info]derekl1963
2009-05-21 07:59 pm UTC (link)
Biosphere 2 was pretty much doomed from the beginning. The project was largely under the direction of environmentalist gurus, and Real Scientists and Real Engineers weren't allowed into the loop until waaay too late.

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Re: Small islands
[info]anzhalyumitethe
2009-05-21 08:19 pm UTC (link)
That;s what I understood too. I think it's caused no end of problems for closed ecosystem development here since too.

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Re: Small islands
[info]derekl1963
2009-05-21 09:04 pm UTC (link)
Huh, looks like the Biosphere people are still at it... dodgy science and all.

http://www.globalecotechnics.com/biosphere%20foundation/overview.html

The other thing that's probably holding back the research, at least in the US, is probably Congress's longstanding unofficial ban on funding anything that looks like Mars Mission research.

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Re: Small islands
[info]anzhalyumitethe
2009-05-21 09:18 pm UTC (link)
Of course.

They're in Santa Fe.

Big Surprise.

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Re: Small islands
[info]beamjockey
2009-05-21 11:57 pm UTC (link)
Eventually, James will come to a contribution by Peter Warshall, "biologist, watershed consultant, CQ Natural History editor, author of Septic Tank Practices."

He would contribute frequently to CoEvolution Quarterly and would go on to a role among the designers of Biosphere 2.

I spotted Warshall's name, but haven't sifted the book to see if there are any other future B2 people jumping into the dialogue.

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Re: Small islands
[info]krin_o_o_
2009-05-21 04:56 pm UTC (link)
I've looked for it in the past, but never found a satisfactory answer.

Cylindrical Rotating Habitats

Given a 3 'crop' rotational system (to keep it simple - although a continuous/incremental system would do better I'm going to skip those for now because the science is still being developed).

If we assume a 12 hr light/dark cycle to provide for both O2 and CO2 cycles in the vegetation. What is the minimum hectares of vegetation needed to provide the O2 and CO2 recycling needed for one person per growing season.

Assuming that at the end of the growing season (using the non-incremental cycle model) how much edible material would be available for consumption by that one person and the re-fertilization of the soil for manual and microbiotic replenishment of the growth nutrients for that plot's next turn in the cycle?

The above rests on the classic agriculture model of plots of soil and growth/harvest/replenishment cycles.

The number of hectares that is a result is the inner surface area needed per person for the classic cylinder rotational based farm.

Back to the obvious...

If you use algae to do a continuous growth medium, then you are not limited to a rotational 2-d system and have a much better throughput in the system. But as a said above, it's still being developed and doesn't have the same 100+ years of research data and practical applications behind it that modern technical farming does.


- krin


Edited at 2009-05-21 04:58 pm UTC

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Re: Small islands
[info]carloshasanax
2009-05-21 06:16 pm UTC (link)
It seems pretty clear O'Neill was speaking ex ano. I don't know of any island that has a closed atmosphere.

Winogradsky invented his semi-famous column in the 1880s, which could be considered a semi-closed ecological cycle. It produced two direct lines of experimentation: the ecospheres, closed glass ecosystems with algae and Hawaiian red shrimp, which last for years; and the Soviet approach to space ecological systems, which was to put a guy in a small sealed tank -- 5 cubic meters -- with some algae and light for recycling, for up to a month. That used [rummages] 3 algae tanks of 15 liters each, with a dry mass of algae of 10 grams per liter.

So a pound of algae and one very unhappy experimental subject, we can probably take as the minimum.

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Re: Small islands
[info]anzhalyumitethe
2009-05-21 08:40 pm UTC (link)
So a pound of algae and one very unhappy experimental subject, we can probably take as the minimum.

Unhappy would be the mild way of putting it.

I would think that if you grew food the amount of algae would go up a lot: soil-air interactions...

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Re: Small islands
[info]carloshasanax
2009-05-21 08:54 pm UTC (link)
No one can say that the Soviets didn't have big brass chromosomes. Living half-suffocated in an airtight Porta-Potty for a month just for a proof of concept! But the later BIOS-3 was substantially bigger.

(Checking, because I check these things, it turns out that 1970s station wagons had similar amounts of passenger plus cargo volume. But I think the experience was probably more like the Porta-Potty.)

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Re: Small islands
[info]anzhalyumitethe
2009-05-21 09:00 pm UTC (link)
fscking nasty.

Something I realized a long while back is that you have to ridiculously overdesign your stations/world ships. There's probably going to be a population growth that's going to be nuts...and over the course of centuries...

Or the whole thing will implode within a decade from a high level of misery.

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Re: Small islands
(Anonymous)
2009-05-22 06:48 am UTC (link)
If its a ship, population growth is going to be adressed by not bloody having any. By legal and medical fiat. For a station, population growth is going to be limited by how much resources the station can devote to building more station, not by how much living space you start out with, because the economics of construction will guarantee that every cube meter will be spoken for on day one. (nobody builds living space for people not born yet.)
And even if a station has a large surplus of industrial capacity and thus can build however much living space is required, I would still expect space stations to be very low population growth places simply because they are by nessesity going to be very hightech, high education ect places. (and honestly, the kids will all be leaving for college anyway.. so actual growth will be immigration.)

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Re: Small islands
[info]anzhalyumitethe
2009-05-22 07:52 pm UTC (link)
If its a ship, population growth is going to be adressed by not bloody having any.

I don't see that as a stable configuration, really...*shrugs* Probably our differences of opinion spring from that.

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Re: Small islands
[info]yorksranter.wordpress.com
2009-05-22 12:33 pm UTC (link)
From another project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioHome):
As a result of the air purification studies, an unspecified student lived in the BioHome for an unspecified period of time. The student made use of the facilities and offered no complaint about the indoor air quality.
I like the "unspecified". Cue JBS Haldane's crack about needing the permission of the Home Secretary to so much as inconvenience a mouse, but being able to do absolutely anything to a student.

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Re: Small islands
[info]yorksranter.wordpress.com
2009-05-22 12:35 pm UTC (link)
There's also a photo of someone in the BIOS-3 here (http://www.biospherics.org/russia.html). Which strongly suggests that being stuck in a Soviet portapotty was a significant part of the volunteer's sufferings.

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Re: Small islands
[info]florbigoo
2009-05-21 10:23 pm UTC (link)
Damn! I threw out all my reprints on ECLSS!!

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Re: Small islands
[info]carloshasanax
2009-05-21 06:28 pm UTC (link)
Here's the 1978 NASA version of Space Ecosynthesis (2 MB pdf).

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[info]roseembolism
2009-05-21 05:27 pm UTC (link)
"I wonder how much of my interest in this sort of thing has been driven by illustrations such as this? I wonder what that guy is pointing at?"

"And when we set off the explosives, the magical light rod thingy will hit the hull right....THERE."

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[info]james_nicoll
2009-05-21 05:36 pm UTC (link)
How the heck does one replace a fluorescent light bulb that large?

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[info]krin_o_o_
2009-05-21 06:04 pm UTC (link)
carefully.

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[info]thesaucernews
2009-05-21 08:21 pm UTC (link)
I had something terribly clever and germain to add, but your bunny icon has apparently eaten my ability... for... think... um

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[info]glaurung_quena
2009-05-21 08:15 pm UTC (link)
The general assumption made by the people doing the conceptual designs of these things was that illumination would always be provided by reflected sunlight (never direct sunlight because we have to shield against the radiation of solar storms), so what looks like a fluorescent tube is actually a complicated mirror tube/fiber optic/light tunnel thingie that takes sunlight being reflected in at the hub and diffuses it along the length of the cylinder.

The need for a fancy reflecting light tunnel mirror thingie is one of the factors against the cylinder and sphere shapes for a space colony -- it's a lot easier to get light into a torus. Here's a good illustration of the illumination scheme for a torus (from NASA's design study).

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[info]carloshasanax
2009-05-21 05:50 pm UTC (link)
Stroud's probably William G. Stroud, the weather satellite guy at Goddard. But I don't know what portions of the space colony problem he's thought to have considered.

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[info]james_nicoll
2009-05-21 05:50 pm UTC (link)
That illustration is interesting for the things it is missing, like a city and a human population large enough to justify building the thing. Why construct what seems to be a random piece of an isolated section of Ohio in space?

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[info]james_nicoll
2009-05-21 06:14 pm UTC (link)
And why is everyone in it wearing boots?

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[info]scentofviolets
2009-05-21 11:09 pm UTC (link)
Because they're about to walk off-panel to go work on the crop of Space Weed. I kid you not, I've seen a proposal that seemed at least semi-serious to grow marijuana in these habitats. For the oxygen, of course. Also, because you can make all sorts of neat stuff that the colonists need out of hemp, like shirts and rope and paper and oil and stuff.

Hmmm . . . maybe you've heard of this too? My memory places this sometime in the 70's, and yes, this seemed to be some sort of SB Whole Earth spinoff organization. I don't think I'm misremembering a bit of sf, say, something by Alan Steele. But then, I wouldn't know if I was, would I?

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[info]sargent
2009-05-22 01:57 am UTC (link)
Those are the heavy boots what keep them from floating away, just like they have to wear on the moon.

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[info]tceisele
2009-05-21 07:19 pm UTC (link)
I suppose the city could be in a layer underneath the "section of Ohio", making everything seen in the picture a glorified roof garden.

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[info]james_nicoll
2009-05-21 06:08 pm UTC (link)
It also raises the interesting idea of what I will call for lack of a better term cities in flight, where entire communities can migrate to where the economic action is (The time scales involved may make this less than entirely effective).

The one example I can think of off-hand of moving O'Neill style habitats [1] is in Vonda McIntyre's Starfarers series, where the vessel used by the heroes is propelled by light that apparently has never heard of F = P/C.


1: Apparently there's a Bova where this is done but I have not read it.

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[info]anton_p_nym
2009-05-21 08:21 pm UTC (link)
I had a scribbled outline for a backstory that had orbital settlements (those that'd picked fusion power sources as opposed to solar) buggering off to the Oort and Kuiper belts after the inner solar system became too infested with self-replicating smart munitions for their comfort, but hadn't worked out any of the math or anything and the whole lump is sitting in my "morgue" folder now.

-- Steve had a few go slow-boating off to "nearby" systems out of paranoid fear of further automated attacks, which made their subsequent encounters with quantum-twinned handwavium gates sent to the same targets at higher speeds by those who stayed "home" interestingly dramatic.

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[info]carloshasanax
2009-05-21 08:36 pm UTC (link)
I'm pretty sure it's in O'Neill's 2081.

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[info]fridgepunk
2009-05-21 07:22 pm UTC (link)
Would any of that hollowing out an asteroid business actually be doable in real life, as most asteroids are now thought to be lumpy and full of holes aren't they?

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[info]mmcirvin
2009-05-21 09:51 pm UTC (link)
Would they have ever had a chance of having the requisite strength under tension? There was always this free-lunch quality to the proposal but if you have to structurally reinforce the asteroid anyway, it doesn't seem so great.

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(Anonymous)
2009-10-28 05:02 am UTC (link)
"Niven fans will note the similarity between this illustration and the habitat the Belters created so they'd have a place where women could bring kids to term (In Known Space, free fall + pregnancy = Very Bad Outcome)."

Which might, in fact, turn out to be true, considering how little data we have on both the effects of long-term microgravity on biology and on the fine-level details of pregnancy and gestation. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about both.

(Yes, astronauts have spent long periods in microgravity, that's just a start.)

A good example of SFnal wishful speculation, it used to be a _common_ trope that low-gravity would make for longer lifespans, absent any data. It turns out that microgravity is very bad for you, we just don't know about 'low' gravity either way yet. Not even data.

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