I'm with the other guy who thinks we should be grounded in reality for now. Space elevators are fun and all, but we could still cover a lot of surface area on the planet, maybe even in the oceans, for plenty of solar panels / arrays to power the world (or a bitcoin miner.) I found this before: https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127One of the big things right now is the minerals required for high efficiency generators, solar panels and batteries for storing it all. Mining space would be a good way to handle that over some of the ethically questionable methods currently used. |
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We should obviously get back to more ethical and less energy demanding storages of wealth such as digging up thousands of tonnes of soil to get a few micrograms of gold or sending little African children into the mines to get it for us.
Nah, they want paper (well, not even that since it's all digital now) where they can create trillions at the push of a button. |
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Does it mean we see it today? nope.
Does it mean we see it tomorrow? nope.
Does it mean if you are storing billions in gold you should shift some to BTC? maybe.
Indeed. The value of gold is largely supported by speculation and those who want a hedge. As soon as any concrete measure in the direction of asteroid mining occurred, the price would surely drop like a rock. |
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I'm fine with investing more, like 2x or 3x.
But some of the pie-in-the-sky ideas I hear here require spending 100x or 1000x more. Is it possible?
Even worse, some daydreamers don't even think about the costs. Or even laws of physics.
They think the 'magic of technology' plus 'magic of positive thinking" can solve absolutely everything. And soon.
One issue is that space has been not only politically unpopular for spending money on (something I nominally agree with as a libertarian) but also heavily controlled and regulated by the government for private companies (something that I don't agree with). The latter has somewhat been relaxed recently but not by much. We went to the moon for political reasons which meant we used technology that wasn't ready then dropped it when those political reasons were no longer present. If it had been for financial reasons, we'd have waited a few years for better tech and probably have moon bases by now or maybe not. Satellites have been financially viable and now there are 2,666 operational satellites of which 1,646 are commercial (data from April 2020). |
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law of physics did not prevent us from visiting moon, sending probes beyond the solar system, exploring other planets and moons of our solar system. it is purely the lack of funding and lack of awareness that keeps us from building a lunar station, sending astronauts to mars, start building a generational space ship, start building lots of ISS alike stations in orbit.
Lack of funding? Because that stuff is super extremely expensive. Why it's so expensive? Laws of physics. I think we've seen from the latest couple of rounds of government expenditure that claiming space exploration as expensive is laughable. In the face of 2 trillion dollars of pork, 150 billion for the ISS looks like pocket change. |
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i was serious. it could wrap around the earth several times as long as it does not wrap around "straight" at a "equatorial" line. in what fashion would it wrap around? can someone elaborate? would a cable attached to a spinning sphere always wrap around an "equatorial" line? or could it also use other latitudes?
edit: i think you thought i was being sarcastic with the "nice problem to think about.thx" but i wasn´t. sorry for not making that clearer.
No, I thought you were being serious because it seems to me you're right. the "other end" would be geosynchronous orbit so ~22.2k miles. Such a station would have to be on the equator so would wrap around equatorially (if it failed in such a fashion). I wish I could remember where I read about it now as it had some other interesting ideas for getting into space like linear accelerators and some weird double-donut thing I didn't understand. Here's some interesting info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator_safety#In_the_event_of_failure |
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the circumference of earth is 24k miles. a space elevator woiuld need to be up probably 22k-26k miles. i guess it depends if this wrap would follow a circumference line or a smaller one. nice problem to think about. thx.
Before you noodle too hard, I very well may be misremembering. It's a fair distance anyway though. |
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Strangely enough, about a week before the Thai navy came after us a friend of mine told me that he has had friends killed who were trying to create technology to go into space.
Mainstreaming space will definitely open a can of worms and rock a few boats. |
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Larry Niven is one of my all time favorite authors.  I rank him as my favorite. Though it's a purely subjective thing.
Need a feature length Ringworld movie.
Right now, Hollywood can just stay the fuck away from anything I love, please. |
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I am certain that there are a lot of people out there that would fear such a feeling spreading throughout the populace. They need us to desire crappy material items.
If you care to read, "Brave New World" covers this nicely. |
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Interestingly All the propositions I've seen are all tethered to a land base, I see no reason to not have it hanging with a landing pad as that would alleviate most of the issues they have been trying to work out.
Alleviates some, aggravates others. Always a trade-off. There was quite a definitive article a few years back but I have no idea where to find it again. Larry Niven has covered some of the issues in one of his essays too. they also have the dual use case of key recovery.  Great minds think alike. |
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Get it into orbit and use it to tether (and as material for) a space elevator.
Now, space elevators are another topic. We don't have the materials right now but fun stuff like if one collapsed, it would wrap around the world a couple of times (IIRC). |
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CTO is a moron. Probably did it to fix a minor problem. I wouldn't have put money on it being an SQL injection but there ya go. |
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Energy is everything. As already noted, with free energy we would be able to create elements instead of mining it.
For space mining we would need to reach orbit with an heavy payload, go to the the asteroid, land, use a lot of energy to probe and mine materials, escape the gravity of the asteroid and come back to earth. I cannot extrapolate any good number but the cost of orbit seems to exponentially grow for biggest ships, and this is a huge ship. Maybe you can do it cheaper with nuclear explosions project-orion-style, but meh.
I suppose that at the current energy costs this is not convenient even if you do not consider the billions in hardware and research.
You don't mine the asteroid in-situ, you fly it back to earth (or lunar) orbit and mine it close to home (scifi type stories are typically based on options that are not available to us in reality). You basically only fly a (or multiple) engines out there. FWIW, asteroid gravity is pretty nominal (why they are asteroids and not a planet) but that's not really relevant to the scenario I'm describing anyway. Here's an article that seems relevant. I don't have time to give it a deep read right now though. https://space.nss.org/technologies-for-asteroid-capture-into-earth-orbit/ |
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coming from a very poor family and I never had any meaningful amount of money way into my 30ies. then bitcoin happened. and one day i was - of all places -strolling through the aisles of a giant home depot store when it dawned on me that prices of things lost their meaning and that i could fill up my cart with what ever i wanted - but -unlike a kids dream in a toys`r us store- the magic was gone. i bought nothing.
I like to tinker with things and I was explaining to a friend that a $4 electronic module from ebay brings me more joy than a new car ever could. (I do need a new car though. F.U. again, Carvana) |
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Energy is pretty cheap in space. You also don't need a whole lot of power as even quite low thrusts will eventually get you where you want to go.
It's not as simple as going from point A to point B. 'Points of interest' in space (like asteroids) are not stationery, but flying as incredible speed. For example, when NASA sent a spacecraft to Pluto, it took 9 years to get there, but they only had 1 day to actually study Pluto. Only 1 day because the spacecraft couldn't just 'stop' once it arrived. Relative speed during Pluto flyby was 13.78 km/s (49,600 km/h; 30,800 mph) so it would requite extraordinary amount of energy to 'stop'. No, you're right, it's not point A to point B. Most things of interest are orbiting the sun so it is a case of matching orbit. This means speeding up or slowing down at strategic points. Typically, one would accelerate for approximately half the journey then decelerate for the other half. Depending on many factors, you might have a long time to do this. Even with quite modest (sub 1G) accelerations, it it possible to travel long distances in quite short times (particularly if one is not having to worry about human cargo). This can be achieved with a photon drive which means you can obtain power from the sun or, for some parts of the journey, a solar sail arrangement (which we are not at yet but given time)... The Pluto flyby being so fast was because it was designed as a flyby, because that better suited the mission parameters rather than a matched orbit. Apples and oranges really. Also bear in mind that the sun is quite weak out in the vicinity of pluto (30-49 AU) vs the asteroid belt (~2.5AU) - inverse-square law. So plenty of energy available for maneuvering. |
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And you can put seastead in the middle of the lake!
I think that may miss the point. JT may have just doxxed himself though. |
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I'm selling almost every day (DCA) to pay for our lake.
We started with regular cars, then lambos, now ranches and lakes...soon whole building blocks and/or villages, then islands, maybe asteroids, planets, stars, etc  You missed out my favourite from the list I'm looking forward to most; the gentlemen's club. What is this, GTA? I was careful enough not to reveal specific amounts, but yeah, shopping takes a whole new meaning for a Bitcoin HoDLer. I just buy what I want. I don't look at prices. I'm not talking about extravagant stuff, but before Bitcoin I used to check the prices to be sure I'm in my budget. Not anymore. The good thing is that I'm not into luxurious (read: expensive) stuff, so anything I need is now well within my reach. That's what I meant by "peace of mind" in my earlier post.
The only thing missing (apart from the pump to $1M) is being able to buy stuff directly with Bitcoin.
Always a little wary as not caring about the price of things is how so many with new-found wealth lose everything. A jetski here, a Merc for your friend(s) there and soon, your accountant is telling you some bad news. It's good to stay grounded but on the other hand, I could probably be spending a little more for things that need it. Buying stuff directly with Bitcoin is out for anything under around 2k with fees right now but if you don't mind indirectly, Newegg takes them through bitpay and purse.io works well. I've even seen a scattering of companies willing to roll the dice with LN. |
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Problem with heavy stuff on other planets is that it's incredibly expensive to move it here. That is, as long as energy is as expensive as it is. But then again, with near free energy we could make any material we wanted right here.
Edit: although this does spell good news for the future power grid on Mars.
Energy is pretty cheap in space. You also don't need a whole lot of power as even quite low thrusts will eventually get you where you want to go. |
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It's fairly certain we're going up. Unless we go down. If neither of those happen, we're definitely going sideways.
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