4 ms·
Although obviously ridiculous in many ways, the ability to design large stable systems is relevant for when thinking about the question "How many O'Neil cylinde
by bmcusick 9y ago
Although obviously ridiculous in many ways, the ability to design large stable systems is relevant for when thinking about the question "How many O'Neil cylinders can we build in the habitable zone?".
If we mine the asteroids, Mars, and Mercury for materials we can build habitable surface areas that are in aggregate many times greater than Earth in size. Each carbon fiber Bishop Ring could have an internal surface area the size of India.
This simulation reminds us that space is really, really big, and really, really empty. If you can fit 416 planets, just think how many space stations you can fit.
- adrianN 9y agoSpace stations can probably also adjust their orbits a bit, so it doesn't have to be stable forever.
- JoeAltmaier 9y agoWith simple electromagnetic tethers! Drop a cable toward the sun, run a current through it and gain impulse from the ambient magnetic field. Or does this only work near a planet?
- clavalle 9y agoIt would work (maybe) but the generated current would be about 50,000 times weaker than it would be using the Earth's magnetic field...at least at the distance of Earth from the Sun.
- JoeAltmaier 9y agoMaybe its still workable - the impulse to keep station at that distance would be smaller too?
- clavalle 9y agoYeah. The main problem with keeping a space station at a stable orbit above Earth is friction with the atmosphere. There might be small adjustments that need to be made where Earth's atmosphere is almost completely negligible but there are fewer forces degrading the orbit and there's no immediate threat of crashing into a planet if the adjustments aren't made in time.
- douglaswlance 9y agoIm not sure biological organisms will ever stick around long enough to do such things. I think the benefits of inorganic organisms are too great. They'll be much more suited for life in space.
- sigstoat 9y ago> the ability to design large stable systems is relevant for when thinking about the question "How many O'Neil cylinders can we build in the habitable zone?". pretty sure the answer is "as many as we can figure out how to get the mass for". absent dismantling the gas giants themselves, you're not going to do anything very interesting do the dynamics of the solar system, regardless of what you take apart, or how you reconstitute it. and the man-made structures can include mechanisms for closed-loop control of their position. which they'd need anyways, as they'd accumulate positional error from vehicles coming and going.
- drak0n1c 9y agoHabitats don't need to be solid rock. It's possible to make many large habitats using the materials from a single large body.
- elihu 9y agoI think the point of building habitats is that spherical planets are a very inefficient use of matter from a surface-area-to-mass ratio point of view. We could create a lot more surface area (i.e. usable land) with less material if it were arranged in a more useful configuration.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoHowever, spherical masses are much more stable gravitationally because the total gravitational potential energy of all mass is the minimum.
- sigstoat 9y agothose are all completely true things. i assume something i said has been misinterpreted, but i can't imagine what or how.
- elihu 9y agoProbably this line: > absent dismantling the gas giants themselves, you're not going to do anything very interesting do the dynamics of the solar system, regardless of what you take apart, or how you reconstitute it. I would consider reconfiguring available materials to achieve more usable surface area to be interesting (not to mention potentially useful if we manage to accomplish it someday). However, what's "interesting" is highly subjective and dependent on context. Perhaps you meant something different by "you're not going to do anything very interesting" than the way some of us are interpreting it?
- stcredzero 9y agoIf you're going to be using artificial habitats to have more living space, 416 is a very small number. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlmKejRSVd8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlmKejRSVd8
- irrational 9y agoDoesn't that depend on how big the artificial habitats are?
- stcredzero 9y agoSpace is really, really big. Also, 3 dimensions are really "big." If you take feasible theoretical material strengths into account, space stays a lot bigger than practical habitats that have gravity.