Space Colonies [3]: Vision: The High Frontier (Dr. Gerard O'Neill)
- From: jdnicoll@xxxxxxxxx (James Nicoll)
- Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 19:52:04 +0000 (UTC)
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/About/Education/SpaceSettlement/CoEvolutionBook/HIGHF.html
We're finally getting into the longer essays, where there is more to discuss.
O'Neill starts off with the three premises he believed drove much of the
discussion about public policy:
1. That for the forseeable future every significant human activity must
be confined to the surface of the earth.
2. That the material and energy resources of the human race are just
those of our planet.
3. That any realistic solutions to our problems of food, population,
energy and materials must be based on a kind of zero-sum game, in which
no resources can be obtained by one nation or group without being taken
from another.
He points out that this leads to a rather unpleasant and constrained future:
"I find it personally shocking that many such observers, even those who
profess to a deep concern for humankind, accept with equanimity the need
for massive starvation, war or disease as necessary precursors to the
achievement of such a systematic global arrangement."
And while I will point out what I see as mistakes in what follows, I
can't with that particular sentence, except to say in some cases I
think "accept with equanimity" could be replaced "accept with tremendous
glee".
His solution is to go after assumptions one and two by urging the
exploitation of extra-terrestrial resources. I would take a closer look
at three, which appears to assume every interaction between two people
leaves at least one of them poorer. This might be the case if Earth were
actually closed, if its resources were as puny as people apparently thought
back in the 8-Track Era and if a resource once used was used up forever
but it isn't, they aren't and while we often do not take advantage of
the opportunities to reuse materials, we could if we chose.
He then tries to position resources in space as being potentially cheaper
than the ones on Earth:
A given solar-energy installation in space, therefore, is potentially
able to operate at a tenth the cost at which it could operate on Earth.
The key word being "potentially". For that to be true, launch costs would
have to drop (he does look for ways to make that happen by turning to off-
world resources that can be got for fewer km/s) and space-rated gear would
have to be comparably priced to Earth-rated gear. It's true that Earth is
in many ways a challenging environment to work in, what with the plentiful
supplies of corrosive water found almost everywhere on the surface, but
humans have a lot of experience designing things to work in that environment.
We do not have a comparable body of experience for space.
I also notice something I think of as "true but not necessarily helpful":
"[The Moon] is a rich source of metals, glass, oxygen, and soil."
That oxygen is bound up and recovering it will not be cheap. I don't know
what state the metals are found in. What he calls soil, I call regolith
and regolith isn't much like the soil in your backyard. Among other
things, the organic constituents of soil are missing in regolith (also,
there's some evidence regolith can do for your lungs what some forms of
asbestos can do). He also mentions the largest asteroids in the context
of the grand scale of development their mass implies (although we did
not and still don't have a great idea of what they are made of, that
arguably could be just the difference between making things out of metal,
out of plastic or out of glass) but doesn't mention that in terms of km/s,
the Big Three are not very close to Earth orbit, which is where most of
the development would be.
You can cut down on the delta vee by sending things via Jupiter (the Panama
Canal of Space) but that will involve limited launch windows and extra
time in transit.
He gives us a target date to consider: 1990. Well, as it turned out it took
longer than that just to get the ISS up in orbit. People back in the 1970s
didn't understand how long it would take to get stuff done in space. He's
also hopeful that fairly advanced habitats could be build sometime between
2020ish and 2080ish, which in the first case can probably be ruled out.
[Hey, does anyone else remember people claiming we needed to build space
habitats by now or the lack of resources would dooooooooooooom us to an
Earthbound poverty?]
"Reasonable estimates of three percent per year for the real income rise,
8% for interest costs and 10% per year for automation advances put the
crossover date (the date when large colonies become economically feasible)
about 40 to 50 years from now - well within the lifetimes of most of the
people who are now alive."
We're coming up on the 40 year point but sadly although economies are
bigger than they were in the 1970s, the cost of doing what he wanted is
still out of reach.
That bit about "well within the lifetimes of most of the people who are
now alive" is important: people tend to be less interested in projects
whose payoff will only be seen by their grandkids (although I can think
of some government projects - OK, one - that took centuries to pay off
but which did produce the product intended when they were supposed to).
He offers the hope that advanced designs might look like this:
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/About/Education/SpaceSettlement/CoEvolutionBook/MODELIII.JPEG
Which makes me wonder whether the space colony advocacy crowd was dominated
by Californians. I suspect that in fact the cost/volume will be high enough
for the foreseeable future to compel the maximum use of limited volume and
that a more appropriate model could be this:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9e/19890327hk.jpg/400px-19890327hk.jpg
He sketches out how extra-terrestrial materials could be got and then
O'Neill then whistles up a potential value for the goods produced at
Island One (a smaller, basic habitat) as "20 billion dollars per year,
in addition to the intrinsic value of goods it produces." He does admit
that this is somewhat academic as long as no goods are actually produced
and then reveals what he feels is the Killer Ap for space: Solar Power
Satellites. He runs though the business case (ignoring the bit where we
didn't actually know how much it would cost to get materials from the Moon)
and even tosses some FUD where the main long-term competitor to solar
power - nuclear fission - is concerned: SPS cannot be turned into weapons
of mass destruction.
Historical note: John McPhee's The Curve of Binding Energy, a large part
of which involved detailing Ted Taylor's fear that there enough security
holes in the fissionable materials industry and enough people playing
at Taylor's level where nuclear explosives were concerned that private
nuclear terrorism (as opposed to the good sort of nuclear terror, which
involves large states shaking tens of thousands of nuclear warheads at
each other) was something people should take steps to prevent, came out
in 1973.
He ends by asserting that almost everyone who corresponds with him agrees
with him and that while he cannot guarentee a glorious future for Man
in Space!, he can certainly try to give us some idea what such a future
might be like.
I think it's interesting that he focuses on poor mineral resources when
he talks about the underdeveloped world. This probably goes back to the
three premises he discussed at the beginning of his essay: if the physical
resources don't exist to support an advanced economy, the gains made
possible by addressing other political and economic shortcomings will
be more limited than if resources are abundant (But on the other hand,
consider Singapore and Hong Kong).
--
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