Takes more DeltaV to get to the Sun than anywhere else in the Solar system. It's 'cheaper' to fly out to Pluto then adjust for a Sol interceptNot to mention it makes more sense to send garbage into the sun,
Takes more DeltaV to get to the Sun than anywhere else in the Solar system. It's 'cheaper' to fly out to Pluto then adjust for a Sol interceptNot to mention it makes more sense to send garbage into the sun,
The United States keeps giving NASA large amount of money and support in hopes they come up with a cheap and effective way to send garbage and waste to the moon. I know there are treaties about dumping things in space or on other planets but I think that goes out the window once humans are able to actually do it at a cheap cost and effectively. Also that treaty law is stupid in regard to lifeless planets. A lifeless rock is the perfect place to send our garbage and waste instead of having it on earth. It also be interesting and possibly helpful to observe what happens to it there. What impacts would this have if NASA is able to figure something out? Is it possible even if given more funding and support? Thoughts?
I'll be damned.Takes more DeltaV to get to the Sun than anywhere else in the Solar system. It's 'cheaper' to fly out to Pluto then adjust for a Sol intercept
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Now there's an idea: excavate under Central Park, use the soil to expand Manhattan, & bury the country's garbage there, leaving the Park intact on top.You do know that if you dig up an area merely the size of Central Park to a depth less than that of the deeper mines you could hold the entire garbage output of the US for centuries if not millennia don't you?
Irrelevant. I am not talking about things we do not know but about things we do know. That's an annoying issue with the people who, like apparently the OP, have only a pop-culture vision of Science, that would make the impossible possible. What it does is to explore what is, and astronautics is pretty well-known: to go from Earth to the Moon, you need some specific amount of DeltaV. You can reduce its cost, but in the end, you're more likely to reduce the cost of other things at the same time and make that "solution" an inefficient one.
It's... not really efficient. Nuclear engineering is quite beyond the idea of lead and boiled water for nuclear propulsion in space. And as for nanorobots, nanotech isn't the magical thing that is presented on TV: I spent four years of my life getting reliable data on the alignment of nanoparticles inside liquid crystals when we thought we had a good method to get them to take a roughly similar orientation in a pretty shitty material, so I'll let you imagine how bloody far we are from bottom-up nanite-based construction of complex structures with space-levels of reliability. Plus, pure hardness isn't necessarly the requirement either, material science being 'slightly' more complex than that in requirements it has to fulfill.The only thing I can come up with is to make really big spaceships and make them nuclear powered. If it is big enough the lead you need to separate the pilots from the radiation can be mitigated by its lighter structure elsewhere. The engine and shielding would be at the bottom and the pilots at the top. Use nanorobots to manufacture it out of diamond to give it strength. You would use the nuclear engine to boil water and expel the steam out the back. I wouldn't use it for garbage but you could put things in orbit for much less money per pound.
Why do you think they'd cost so much? Construction in L4/L5, using captured NEAs, shouldn't remotely cost so much.
Could just shoot it off a mass driver instead, although I guess if you have that sort of energy laying around, might as well just incinerate it (with the bonus that incineration in space won't produce pollution).Takes more DeltaV to get to the Sun than anywhere else in the Solar system. It's 'cheaper' to fly out to Pluto then adjust for a Sol intercept
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Which doesn't address my question. They're not being launched from the bottom of an 11kps gravity well--they're being built in cislunar space.Because they are utterly, utterly huge objects which weigh several gigatons each.
Check the cost of the ISS. Then wonder how much a shipyard for such gigaprojects would cost.Which doesn't address my question. They're not being launched from the bottom of an 11kps gravity well--they're being built in cislunar space.Only a lunatic (or a "Star Trek" writer
) would build them on a planet.
Yes--once.Check the cost of the ISS. Then wonder how much a shipyard for such gigaprojects would cost.
*le sigh*Yes--once.
After it's been built, it doesn't need to be rebuilt.
And that is presupposing it can't be built by telefactors.
build the 5-10K O'Neill cylinders (300-500 billion each) needed to house all of humanity.
Why do you think they'd cost so much? Construction in L4/L5, using captured NEAs, shouldn't remotely cost so much.
We are talking about building country's in space yes so add up how much a 1st world county would cost to 'build' and then add how much life support would cost...... and you have to do it in space.....more of a bloody country in space.
The costs wouldn't be in hundreds of billions but closer to tens or hundreds of trillions.
The estimate I made was for the initial shipyard setup, and was most likely too optimistic, by the way. Then you have to actually build that shit by mining most of the asteroid belt with a fleet of space tugs. It'd be so much cheaper to actually do some geo-engineering for Earth or, you know, get everyone on Earth inside huge arcologies, AKA planet-based autonomous spaceships that have all the perks and none of the inconvenience.We are talking about building country's in space yes so add up how much a 1st world county would cost to 'build' and then add how much life support would cost...... and you have to do it in space.....
It's... not really efficient. Nuclear engineering is quite beyond the idea of lead and boiled water for nuclear propulsion in space. And as for nanorobots, nanotech isn't the magical thing that is presented on TV: I spent four years of my life getting reliable data on the alignment of nanoparticles inside liquid crystals when we thought we had a good method to get them to take a roughly similar orientation in a pretty shitty material, so I'll let you imagine how bloody far we are from bottom-up nanite-based construction of complex structures with space-levels of reliability. Plus, pure hardness isn't necessarly the requirement either, material science being 'slightly' more complex than that in requirements it has to fulfill.
Please, do not take it as an insult for it honestly isn't one, but your post illustrates quite well what I was saying in the one you quoted, that many people seem to have a pop-culture vision of science and engineering in that you do not know enough to know what you don't know. Once again, this is not insulting, it's a reality that concerns all of us, me included, on 99 percent of human knowledge. If I talk about biology or, say, sociology in some country, I will be unaware of what I actually don't know and the first things I'll eventually learn if I get onto these fields will be to realize how much I didn't know. After several years working in a field, one can expect to have a rough idea of what they don't know. This does not mean that you should shut up, though, far from it, but rather that you should try and look for documentation from serious sources that explain for non-specialists what is currently being done in the fields that make you curious.
Theoretically being the word. But then we go back to my previous answer, which is that if we're starting to make century-long hypotheses, we might very well get to molecular foundries, some sort of mind uploading or whatever singularity, AKA it's not exactly a somehow preferable long-term solution, particularly when the problems the OP seem to want to solve are much, much closer to us than that.We are talking within a few centuries, not next week. On that timescale, it is theoretically possible.
Theoretically being the word. But then we go back to my previous answer, which is that if we're starting to make century-long hypotheses, we might very well get to molecular foundries, some sort of mind uploading or whatever singularity, AKA it's not exactly a somehow preferable long-term solution, particularly when the problems the OP seem to want to solve are much, much closer to us than that.
I feel it usually does without saying. Rails transport raw materials and processed goods to ports and the ships take them elsewhere where the stuff is then send by trucks or trains to their destinations. It is when you get things like flowers or fruit that you sometimes use places. They do that in Kenya, where they apparently set up a terminal just to deal with sending flowers to Europe. It is rather profitable though of course depends on there being tens of millions of people willing to buy them and they can focus on certain times of the year. And really, this is how pollution and environmental damage is often dealt with these days. Let it happen somewhere else and reap the benefits. Sending stuff into space will be a terrible waste of oil given the rocket fuel needed. Plus the rockets themselves will probably be going on a one way trip, as they can hardly just dump it into space, or there will be more space junk smashing into satellites.Fun thing people forget when talking about planes and stuff? Freight transport is still massively done through ships rather than planes for a very good reason: it’s a lot cheaper.
Which doesn't address my question. They're not being launched from the bottom of an 11kps gravity well--they're being built in cislunar space.Only a lunatic (or a "Star Trek" writer
) would build them on a planet.
*le sigh*
No, not really. Like, not at all. We are talking about something massively bigger and more complex than the ISS, that would be much further away, making its requirements go up several orders of magnitude in terms of autonomy, of safety, of life support, of long-term crew survivability, and so on, with a quantity of problems to solve we have literally no idea about at the time being. In such an environment, each "productive" worker would need a complete logistics chain that would be enclosed inside the station, and you'd need enough of these workers to build something bigger than the biggest Earth-side projects ever built. It would be less of a shipyard and more of a bloody country in space. The costs wouldn't be in hundreds of billions but closer to tens or hundreds of trillions. With the knowledge that a critical accident would leave hundreds of thousands dead (because that'd be the minimal requirements for an autonomous station far from Earth capable of building O'Neil habitats, considering the logistics needed by the workers). Please don't minimize the difficulty of space engineering.
You're clearly grossly underestimating the mass of the asteroid belt, which is something like 3 million trillion tons. In other words, considering that an O'Neill cylinder weighs something like 5 billion tons, mining "most" of the asteroid belt would allow you to build on the order of a half a billion O'Neill cylinders, enough to house perhaps tens of trillions of people. Needless to say, actually building that would take centuries, if not millennia, and would be a highly incremental process. Costing that into projections for what it would cost to build one O'Neill cylinder, or even set up the infrastructure to build one O'Neill cylinder is like adding the cost for building all of modern New York City and its urban area to what the Dutch paid for Manhattan (which is surely in the trillions if not tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars in real terms) and declaring that it was a terrible, stupid deal.The estimate I made was for the initial shipyard setup, and was most likely too optimistic, by the way. Then you have to actually build that shit by mining most of the asteroid belt with a fleet of space tugs.
Exactly right. (I wish I'd said that.You're clearly grossly underestimating the mass of the asteroid belt, which is something like 3 million trillion tons. In other words, considering that an O'Neill cylinder weighs something like 5 billion tons, mining "most" of the asteroid belt would allow you to build on the order of a half a billion O'Neill cylinders, enough to house perhaps tens of trillions of people. Needless to say, actually building that would take centuries, if not millennia, and would be a highly incremental process. Costing that into projections for what it would cost to build one O'Neill cylinder, or even set up the infrastructure to build one O'Neill cylinder is like adding the cost for building all of modern New York City and its urban area to what the Dutch paid for Manhattan (which is surely in the trillions if not tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars in real terms) and declaring that it was a terrible, stupid deal.
In reality, an O'Neill cylinder probably would not cost anything like that in relative terms because it would most likely not be built until a series of incremental developments had been done: smaller habitats and stations developing the techniques and infrastructure, along with economic developments creating the demand for more and more habitat space until building an O'Neill cylinder makes sense.