3 ms·
It would be interesting. On the front of moving industry off world, it does not need to be far future. In fact, we really should have gotten on this years ago
by survirtual 4y ago
It would be interesting.
On the front of moving industry off world, it does not need to be far future. In fact, we really should have gotten on this years ago already.
We are behind schedule.
Our aversion to nuclear tech has set humanity back decades. Chemical rockets are not sustainable. Nuclear fusion rockets would be, but fear of nuclear fission made society largely afraid of all things nuclear & reliant on oil based energy gen, and the advent of dirt cheap solar allows us to have more time being afraid & using energy sources that constrain us to Earth’s surface.
Use of nuclear energy comes with it a more educated world populace wrt nuclear engineering (nuclear physics is more or less completely understood so the adventure here is in engineering and material sciences). With that more educated populace comes miniaturization of nuclear reactors, materials that can handle radiation better, perhaps even materials that can generate charge when struck by radiation such that most energy is captured in a usable form instead of generating unstable isotopes (think: like solar panels but for alpha / beta / gamma radiation). It also means more people with the background to make fusion a reality.
With fusion reactors comes fusion rockets. Contained plasma has a cool feature of being useful as a clean, high-energy matter stream that can be ejected (and imparting force) while simultaneously generating energy, all while potentially requiring orders of magnitude less reactant mass. This would completely change our relationship with space.