There's definitely a "tragedy of the commons" vibe to all of this. No one wants to bear the cost, and everyone assumes someone else will eventually clean it up. Meanwhile, space gets more crowded and fragile
There's definitely a "tragedy of the commons" vibe to all of this. No one wants to bear the cost, and everyone assumes someone else will eventually clean it up. Meanwhile, space gets more crowded and fragile
It's kind of like how the Rhino was endangered in Africa, until ownership was allowed. Who owns orbits?
I'm not sure if this would be practical. I wonder if a laser fired from a higher orbit at the debris as it approaches over the earth horizon would slow it down, and gradually push it to lower orbits and eventually reenter. This could possibly work for the small stuff anyway.
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Imagine if humanity ending is not because we cannot exit the planet that we have destroyed for a better one, but because we’ve also polluted earths orbit so much that it becomes impossible to escape.
No point - the universe is too large to think we could get to a better planet even in the best case of it being close to us. Light years are not small and the energy needed to reach them too large. A generational ship is the only hope and we have no reason to think we can make one that will survive the trip.
The above is a consequence of physics and not an opinion. Even if we discover "new physics" it still needs to fit all the data we have and so that is unlikely to help.
I still don't get how people are so fixed on planets - is it because of Star Trek or Star Wars or in general being more consumable for the average human ? Even just the Solar system has resources and energy to build artificial habitats for trilions of people, based just on current and near term technology scaled up & robust in space infrastructure. It's just about getting to it and the necessary time and resource investments to get things running.
We have no clue how to create artificial gravity. Current human space missions of found lots of negative effects on humans in space that are because of lack of gravity. there are a number of other problems they are researching with no reason to think they can be solved except via gravity.
Also your space station suffers the same lifetime issues of a generation ship: it will decay over time, so you still are dependent on earth (or at least a planet) to provide resources.
If we're talking space colonies that house large numbers of people wouldn't they be large enough to spin for artificial gravity?
Yeah, just spin it - like Oneil Island 3 or similar (Stanfort Torus, etc.): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder
That's a 1975 design using quite conservative 1950s tech - lots of bulk steel and aluminium with unprocessed Lunar regolith for shielding.
There's some calculation around that say you can't make usably-large habitats by plugging them in a tether and spinning them... so people almost universally decided that you can't make usably-large habitats that spin.
I guess that's the nature of internet arguments.
I'm interested in spin gravity but I've never heard of this before. Where can I find these calculations?
I don't remember where you can find it.
But that tether will have to lift the entire weight of your ship, plus a share of its own weight. The longer you make it, the heavier it will be, and you get a problem similar to a space elevator, and before you get to city-sized, it seems to require exotic materials already.
The choice of materials impose a maximum size for any design that rotates as a whole.
Maybe. Is that good enough or not is an open question. Also is it feasible or is the engineering too difficult for some reason?
I always thought the scenes in Wall-E showing the space ships colliding with all the space junk were horribly unrealistic. They should show the space ships exploding and all the humans and bots perishing.
Even with a full on Kessler syndrome scenario happening the risk to an object moving through LEO, (rather than attempting to stay there) is minimal.
And if we've got hypothetical indistinguishable-from-magic tech to reach and colonise faraway planets, we'll have mastered the relatively trivial problem of clearing LEO
Even if a few would manage to escape a dying world, billions would perish. "Humanity" will have been lost anyways.
Currently yes, but let’s imagine we have a few hundred years to plan our escape.
The people in charge will spend the time and resources ensuring their comfort and security, they won’t ensure that normal people are saved.
The elites will send their art collection to space before the poor
Heh, there's a story to be written there about a spaceship carrying art crewed by LLMs. "Full self-flying", said the salesman CEO.
It'd also be interesting if what gets sent to space is an SQL database which most important table has the columns account_owner, account_balance..
Let's call it the B ark.
Why waste time writing dystopian fiction when you can just let reality happen?