Jeff Foust read what appears to be a dumb book so you don’t have to.
39 thoughts on “A Dyspeptic Futurist”
At some point I’m going to tackle Abundance so you won’t have to…
Very strange. Have been trying to add a comment to this thread and not succeeding. Content related issue? Anyway this is more of a test than a comment.
I would agree that O’Neill space colonies can’t work, but that’s because of some engineering oversights.
The first thing I concluded was that the vast windows are an insanely expensive failure point, though not actually needed in any quantity. There are far better ways to accomplish the same thing that wouldn’t look like a bright star in black space, despite all the renderings showing what looks like a blue sky. Solar panels powering LED lighting would be just about as efficient at providing light per area of collector, and could double as display screens showing a sky. That unhooks the power source from having to rotates with the target of the illumination, and makes everything vastly simpler.
Nor is the dynamic instability of most O’Neill stations a problem, because you can avoid those problems simply by not building long thin rotating cylinders with giant mirrors hanging off them.
No, the real problem is that they have too much internal volume. We don’t think about internal empty volume on Earth because we don’t have to. Every internal space we build comes with free air, so it’s not a worry here.
But when you do the math, for every person you launch into space on a Starship, you’ll need to launch two or three more Starships full of of liquid nitrogen, which is going to be used to form a column of breathable air extending for miles above their house on the colony. What are those miles of air in that vertical column doing? Nothing. They’re just there to give the landscape painters something pretty to look at. So we need to ditch the big hollow space colony idea, or go all the way out to Neptune for a massive nitrogen harvest.
Once you strip that away, building space colonies of almost any size is pretty simple. They would be smaller units, perhaps more the size of airliners or ships, and thus much easier to manufacture, linked together and spinning on a common axis. That’s not much different from various imaginings of large, rotating, planetary transport vessels, but without a big engine to move them to other planets.
And from there everything is cost, ROI, and demand.
George, while I don’t think massive, air-filled spaces in space will be a thing in the near future, I think it’ll be a bling thing beyond that.
Well eventually do it, but the only good source of nitrogen is going to be the gas giants and their moons. Oxygen is easy. Aluminum and steel and glass are easy (relatively). Water is probably going to be pretty easy in the quantities required, at least for Mars.
It’s the staggering quantities of inert gas that’s the problem, and without the inert gas, it’s not safe to fill big volumes up with O2 and live in them.
I’ve long been of the opinion large rotating space stations about the size of Kalpana One might be the beginnings of “space settlement” as living space for remote contract workers in the next century. Say out in the Saturn system, or for workers in the Trojans and on Callisto?
Isaac Asimov seems to have invented the concept, which he called “spomes.,” and noted when spomes were common, an adventurous community might add propulsion to theirs and set out for interstellar space. I based the background of my Silvergirl stories and novels on this idea, jumping from one Oort Cloud to another.
So you’re saying Gerard O’Neill’s concept space colonies from the 1970s are no longer considered the most optimal design. That’s hardly surprising you would expect the space colony designs to evolve like everything else does. I would guess a combination of the van Braun wheeled space station with some variation would turn out to be the best optimum use of enclosed volume for maximum human habitation. You probably would take advantage of let’s say the “sky” (ceiling) is only a 100m above you and you have some sort of HD strip that projects a high pixel beautiful blue sky during the “day” cycle and starlit during “night,”. Maybe eventually something as long as 200 km or longer consisting of a sequence of von Braun type more or less wheel shapes connected by a shaft along the axis of rotation to produce gravity this would allow for variable gravity at different parts of the space colony to allow for people coming from say Mars or the moon trying to reacclimate themselves to Earth gravity. Something vaguely like the “biospheres” of the defunct science fiction series starlost from the 1970s
The Von Braun colonies are dynamically stable. The long thing O’Neill Colony 3 types are not. They will start to wobble and then flip their axis of rotation so that they’re tumbling end over end.
There are some excellent Youtube videos on the “intermediate axis theorem” that explain why that is. Fundamentally, if rotating about the axis whose moment of inertia is intermediate between that of the other two axes, small wobbles get amplified. At first it looks like gyro precession, but it keeps on getting bigger. Rotating about the long axis (the one with the most inertia) is a way the structure can dump kinetic energy while conserving its angular momentum, so that’s what it eventually does.
But it’s a trivial problem to avoid in the design stage. You just make sure the colony is a ring or disk instead of a long tube or spiraling football.
The nitrogen problem is also easy to solve by not building huge internal volumes. The Earth’s atmosphere weighs 26 million tonnes per square mile. The nitrogen component is 18 million tonnes per square mile. That’s 180,000 Starship launches at 100 tonnes each just to get the nitrogen to LEO. You can build the giant colony in a decade or so, and launch all the colonists to it in a few months. But then you’ll spend all your launch cadence for the next 200 years trying to put the air in it. Another way to look at it is that those internal volumes are so large that if the oxygen recycling system goes down, there’s so much air in the colony that nobody would worry about the problem for a century or two. The big designs have a ridiculously large air reserve. We don’t design in a centuries worth of backup battery capacity, or a century’s worth of canned food, but since air is invisible, we accidentally did design colonies with centuries’ worth of reserve atmosphere, and didn’t notice because the result looked so normal, with fields and forests.
“The big designs have a ridiculously large air reserve. ”
Could they be designed with concentric layers inside of them like floors to take advantage of that much enclosed air ?There’s no point as you say in having that much empty space not being utilized Is each floor having a artificial “sky “of a HD projected images. Maybe each internal “floor” is say separated by a 100m give or take.
That would be ideal, but of course corporate is going to make those ceilings a lot lower to maximize ROI. They will have some big rooms, but those are the draw to attract new residents, kind of like the gym and volleyball courts at an apartment complex.
But after the initial resource squeeze, where in effect everybody is poor and living in the cramped (but very nice!) working class slums (they’ll never be called that), move and more resources will get accessed, the end point of which is that the descendants of the first colonists will go fox hunting on their estates in orbit around Saturn.
And how that happens is just lots of people making daily business decisions and taking risks and financial gambles.
And likely by the time we’re building island 3 size space colonies O’Neill or otherwise we would likely have access to gigawatt class fusion rockets similar to the sunbird model Capable of reaching the moons of the gas giants in order to yes retrieve liquid nitrogen for transportation back to the inner Solar System for said space colonies.
Lets build wheels, within wheels. Lets say that you have 10 wheels. The inner most wheel, would have 1/10th of Earth’s gravity. The outer most wheel would have 1 G of Earth’s gravity. You start out by building the inner wheel first. People in their 50s, and older would settle there. These would be built in LEO. We can start out with inflatables, and later on rigid sections. With inflatables, there would be an inner wall, and outer wall. Fill the space between the two walls with dirt, and rocks mined on the Moon.
Over time, the inflatable part would be replaced by rigid structures.
Each wheel would be 480 feet across. From street level, to ceiling, it would be 400 feet. Below street level, 80 feet. That is where the transport tubes would be, and where the farms would be.
There would be 10 spokes. They would be about 200 feet across. Lots of apartments would be in the spokes. But only about 5 spokes would reach the center. The hub would be 800 feet wide, and 2,000 feet long. Lots of hotel rooms would be located in the hub. Along with movie, and TV production.
One of the spokes would contain the hospital, college, and medical school.
I don’t know what the population would be. But it would start out small, and grow larger, and larger, over time. It would also keep changing. One thing that would be great to have, is a large ramp going from one level, to another level. It would look like a hill. With trees, and a stream. The stream would carry water from one level, to a lower level.
One important element in a Van Braun style hub is cooling and airflow. The lighting is dumping heat into all the occupied areas, so it’s convenient to have that heat rise into spokes that radiate it into space and then return the cooler air in a loop driven by natural convection. The loop should create a natural breeze.
Well looking ahead if we have gigawatt class fusion rockets based on the sunbird burning helium 3 and deterium we would probably be harvesting the atmosphere of the ice giants Uranus and Neptune for helium 3. Higher concentration then Saturn much lower gravity and much less radiation so the people who will be building the island 3 would probably be more analogous to Donald Trump’s marilargo in space then low rent housing. Rich people throughout history have been known to dump money into real estate building huge idyllic Earth environment like space colonies might just be the investment for the space trillionaires. Modeled after the most beautiful land on Earth.
The Helium 3 magnates wealth would probably dwarf even the precious metal asteroid entrepreneurs. They could certainly afford such ambitious real estate projects. Although if it is a layered very large space colony with “decks” separated by an artificial HD “sky” some of the decks would be “1st class” for the super wealthy and their families/support staff/etc. The ones with the +100M high “ceiling”; room for tress/forests/parks etc. The other desks progressively less spacious/luxurious; human class systems playing out again in space.,
I think He-3 is kind of sketchy as a business venture because if you can build a fusion reactor that runs on He3, it probably won’t be long before you can build a better fusion reactor that can run on just hydrogen.
“..probably won’t be long before you can build a better fusion reactor that can run on just hydrogen.”
My understanding is that it’s vastly more difficult to do proton- proton fusion then helium 3 -deuterium fusion. You probably be more likely to do helium 3 fused with helium 3 followed by perhaps proton fusing with boron 11. Both while difficult are far more practical and likely to happen long before fusing hydrogen with hydrogen like the sun/stars. it’s a slow reaction that’s why stars can run for billions of years.
Helium 3 is worth about:
Helium-3 now commands a stable price of around $20 million per kilogram, said Meyerson. Interlune is sharply focused near-term on extracting Helium-3 for superconducting quantum computing applications. The Helium-3 itself is used to cool the devices to as close a temperature to absolute zero as possible. “Quantum computing is the key demand generator for us.”
That would be about $20K per gram; Gold is about $107 per gram
Its only used now for relatively few uses; imagine if the Sunbird Fusion rockets burning De – He3 take off. Presumably terrestrial fusion reactors would follow. Massive spike in demand
Proton- Boron 11 fusion is the way to go. He3 is a distraction.
I’m not aware the Inertial Electrostatic fusion of P-B11 has been shown experimentally not to work.
“Proton- Boron 11 fusion is the way to go.”
Some of the fusion start up companies are working on proton boron 11 fusion I’m not sure how far away they are from actual break even. The Sunbird 2MW fusion rocket is supposed to be tested in orbit in 2027. Don’t know if any of those fusions start-ups are even thinking in terms of boron 11 proton fusion for space propulsion. I think they’re primarily interested in terrestrial power generation.
Getting the energy of the reaction out as neutrons is pretty horrible.
P-B11 gets you 3 helium 4 ions.
“Getting the energy of the reaction out as neutrons is pretty horrible.”
The deuterium helium 3 reaction the main reaction doesn’t produce neutrons however there is a side reaction when two deuteriums fuse that produce neutrons but the amount is vastly less than the deuterium tritium burn. The helium 3 helium 3 burn produces no neutrons and is much easier to ignite and has a higher energy than your proton boron 11 burn so it looks like helium 3 would be the fuel of choice for quite some time.
Also there is a side reaction in your Boron 11 proton fusion burn involving an alpha particle with boron 11 producing a neutron. Don’t know how that side reaction stacks up against the deuterium to deuterium side reaction from the much easier to ignite deuterium helium 3 reaction.
The Rider thesis that got him a PhD at MIT says you can’t get net energy out of P-B11 reactions due to bremsstrahlung losses in the plasma. That was back in 1995. Anything new in this area to revise that conclusion?
A pity because the alpha particles emitted are positively charged and can be coupled inductively to draw electricity directly out of the fusion reaction w/o an intermediary. The only waste is Helium. Set the reaction rate to operate at 60 per second and voila! This was Paul M. Koloc’s idea when he was still with us.
Finally, this posted. I have no idea what was in the content of the original on this that was causing trouble.
Like I said there are apparently some fusion startup companies working specifically on proton Boron 11 fusion. Can’t vouch for how viable they are and how soon they think they will reach break even. I would guess that a proton – boron 11 reactor would be bulkier heavier than a deuterium helium 3 reactor because of the higher temperature needed etc. Not an issue for terrestrial power generation perhaps but the power to weigh ratio would matter for space propulsion applications. Obviously the fuel Boron 11 is many orders of magnitude cheaper than He3; even if at some point we were mining the atmospheres of say Uranus or Neptune for said He3 to augment terrestrial sources. The lunar helium 3 is closer but the concentration are many orders of magnitude lower as well as the aggregate amount available.
What about Polywell fusion? Robert Bussard was working on that before he died. I think that should be studied more.
He notes he is not sure what will replace that vision of space as the future. The only concrete proposal he provides is to get rid of billionaires—or, rather, their billions, suggesting that an individual’s net worth be capped at $500 million: “there’s no reason we as a society have to put up with the continued existence of billionaires,” who he argues help “fringe philosophies” thrive. (In the book’s acknowledgement section, he thanks, ironically, the financial support he received from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a nonprofit established by a businessman who was a billionaire in today’s dollars at the time of his death.)
Of course, he would tilt at the rich guy windmill. I wonder how much of this space naysaying is just envious ideologues downplaying the field because there are rich guys in it.
<i“There’s no reason we as a society have to put up with the continued existence of billionaires” who he argues help “fringe philosophies.”
If that’s true, then I would argue with even more validity that there’s no reason why we as a society have to put up with envious scolds who presume the right to in any way limit the lives of any other person, a presumption born of the most fringe of all philosophies.
We should instead deport them to the Moon or Mars, and leave it to them to come up with ways to survive. That way, they’d never have to “put up with” either billionaires, or any of the other billions of people who are better at life than they are.
Well, that was a massive html mess…
At least it posted. 🙂
There is a considerable hypocrisy to Adam Becker’s (the author) stance. Not least is the justifying of a terrible policy on the basis of suppressing “fringe philosophies”. As you note, the author is yet another fringe philosophy. How much suppression of his philosophies is warranted when the fringe threat already justifies stealing trillions of dollars?
What makes it utter delusion is the assumption that his people will be in charge when the revolution comes. If that’s going to happen then why aren’t they in charge already?
My view is that every belief we have beyond those generated by our senses (like glowing red stove elements are hot) used to be a fringe belief at one time. Every one of those used to be believed only by a small group of people. If we suppress fringe beliefs, then where will future beliefs come from? It’s an astoundingly conservative argument when you think about it, which Becker probably ought to do at some point.
O’Neil’s mass drivers do exist, we know them by the sobriquet of rail gun. I read it near when it came out, even at the time I questioned the advisability of launching vast quantities of rocks, willy-nilly, in all directions. His centrifugal mass drivers were an especially silly idea.
Some of his other ideas were better and was one of the first to point out that long term occupancy in space required about a ton per square foot of fairly low atomic number material between the putative settler and the rest of the universe or some way to repair the inevitable genetic damage.
That includes being oddly dismissive of the Overview Effect, the worldview-shifting experience of spaceflight that many space travelers have reported.
The Overview Effect is BS and the people who believe in it always portray it as exclusive enlightenment that always supports totalitarian leftism.
The only concrete proposal he provides is to get rid of billionaires—or, rather, their billions, suggesting that an individual’s net worth be capped at $500 million: “there’s no reason we as a society have to put up with the continued existence of billionaires,
Yeah well, that is what Jeff votes for.
The only concrete proposal he provides is to get rid of billionaires—or, rather, their billions,
May I humbly offer my services?
If you “get rid of billionaires” all you would do is setup a new overclass (the government bureaucrats/politicians) that would be the de facto “owners” of their former largess. Most of said billionaires wealth is the stock value in the companies they own/created. You couldn’t hope to sell vast amounts of Tesla/Amazon/SpaceX/Microsoft stock (to pay the wealth tax) and recoup little more than pennies on the dollar. That is the stock value would collapse making it a non-starter as far as raising significant amounts of deficit reducing tax. The only logical strategy would be to compel the billionaires to sign over their shares to some kind of holding company administered by the federal government. In other words the result would be state ownership of the (significant) means of production; that is Communism. That is the mayoral candidate/Bernie Saunders/ the left’s goal all along.
Business is an informal separation of power that I believe has been instrumental in preserving the democracies of the world for centuries. Just like any other faction they can gain too much power. But it’s foolish for us to obsessively destroy business power and allow the factions of government to take over.
If Space Settlements (Colonies) ever happen, even planetary settlements, we need to prove the procreation of humans is possible in low gravity. People will never “go to space” in large numbers, they will be BORN there.
Space colonies won’t likely have low gravity presumably they’ll be designed to reflect the most ideal environments on earth gravity atmosphere greenery etc so hopefully that would address your concern. More Earth like than Earth would probably be a selling point for why people want to immigrate to the space colony.
At some point I’m going to tackle Abundance so you won’t have to…
Very strange. Have been trying to add a comment to this thread and not succeeding. Content related issue? Anyway this is more of a test than a comment.
I would agree that O’Neill space colonies can’t work, but that’s because of some engineering oversights.
The first thing I concluded was that the vast windows are an insanely expensive failure point, though not actually needed in any quantity. There are far better ways to accomplish the same thing that wouldn’t look like a bright star in black space, despite all the renderings showing what looks like a blue sky. Solar panels powering LED lighting would be just about as efficient at providing light per area of collector, and could double as display screens showing a sky. That unhooks the power source from having to rotates with the target of the illumination, and makes everything vastly simpler.
Nor is the dynamic instability of most O’Neill stations a problem, because you can avoid those problems simply by not building long thin rotating cylinders with giant mirrors hanging off them.
No, the real problem is that they have too much internal volume. We don’t think about internal empty volume on Earth because we don’t have to. Every internal space we build comes with free air, so it’s not a worry here.
But when you do the math, for every person you launch into space on a Starship, you’ll need to launch two or three more Starships full of of liquid nitrogen, which is going to be used to form a column of breathable air extending for miles above their house on the colony. What are those miles of air in that vertical column doing? Nothing. They’re just there to give the landscape painters something pretty to look at. So we need to ditch the big hollow space colony idea, or go all the way out to Neptune for a massive nitrogen harvest.
Once you strip that away, building space colonies of almost any size is pretty simple. They would be smaller units, perhaps more the size of airliners or ships, and thus much easier to manufacture, linked together and spinning on a common axis. That’s not much different from various imaginings of large, rotating, planetary transport vessels, but without a big engine to move them to other planets.
And from there everything is cost, ROI, and demand.
George, while I don’t think massive, air-filled spaces in space will be a thing in the near future, I think it’ll be a bling thing beyond that.
Well eventually do it, but the only good source of nitrogen is going to be the gas giants and their moons. Oxygen is easy. Aluminum and steel and glass are easy (relatively). Water is probably going to be pretty easy in the quantities required, at least for Mars.
It’s the staggering quantities of inert gas that’s the problem, and without the inert gas, it’s not safe to fill big volumes up with O2 and live in them.
I’ve long been of the opinion large rotating space stations about the size of Kalpana One might be the beginnings of “space settlement” as living space for remote contract workers in the next century. Say out in the Saturn system, or for workers in the Trojans and on Callisto?
Isaac Asimov seems to have invented the concept, which he called “spomes.,” and noted when spomes were common, an adventurous community might add propulsion to theirs and set out for interstellar space. I based the background of my Silvergirl stories and novels on this idea, jumping from one Oort Cloud to another.
So you’re saying Gerard O’Neill’s concept space colonies from the 1970s are no longer considered the most optimal design. That’s hardly surprising you would expect the space colony designs to evolve like everything else does. I would guess a combination of the van Braun wheeled space station with some variation would turn out to be the best optimum use of enclosed volume for maximum human habitation. You probably would take advantage of let’s say the “sky” (ceiling) is only a 100m above you and you have some sort of HD strip that projects a high pixel beautiful blue sky during the “day” cycle and starlit during “night,”. Maybe eventually something as long as 200 km or longer consisting of a sequence of von Braun type more or less wheel shapes connected by a shaft along the axis of rotation to produce gravity this would allow for variable gravity at different parts of the space colony to allow for people coming from say Mars or the moon trying to reacclimate themselves to Earth gravity. Something vaguely like the “biospheres” of the defunct science fiction series starlost from the 1970s
The Von Braun colonies are dynamically stable. The long thing O’Neill Colony 3 types are not. They will start to wobble and then flip their axis of rotation so that they’re tumbling end over end.
There are some excellent Youtube videos on the “intermediate axis theorem” that explain why that is. Fundamentally, if rotating about the axis whose moment of inertia is intermediate between that of the other two axes, small wobbles get amplified. At first it looks like gyro precession, but it keeps on getting bigger. Rotating about the long axis (the one with the most inertia) is a way the structure can dump kinetic energy while conserving its angular momentum, so that’s what it eventually does.
But it’s a trivial problem to avoid in the design stage. You just make sure the colony is a ring or disk instead of a long tube or spiraling football.
The nitrogen problem is also easy to solve by not building huge internal volumes. The Earth’s atmosphere weighs 26 million tonnes per square mile. The nitrogen component is 18 million tonnes per square mile. That’s 180,000 Starship launches at 100 tonnes each just to get the nitrogen to LEO. You can build the giant colony in a decade or so, and launch all the colonists to it in a few months. But then you’ll spend all your launch cadence for the next 200 years trying to put the air in it. Another way to look at it is that those internal volumes are so large that if the oxygen recycling system goes down, there’s so much air in the colony that nobody would worry about the problem for a century or two. The big designs have a ridiculously large air reserve. We don’t design in a centuries worth of backup battery capacity, or a century’s worth of canned food, but since air is invisible, we accidentally did design colonies with centuries’ worth of reserve atmosphere, and didn’t notice because the result looked so normal, with fields and forests.
“The big designs have a ridiculously large air reserve. ”
Could they be designed with concentric layers inside of them like floors to take advantage of that much enclosed air ?There’s no point as you say in having that much empty space not being utilized Is each floor having a artificial “sky “of a HD projected images. Maybe each internal “floor” is say separated by a 100m give or take.
That would be ideal, but of course corporate is going to make those ceilings a lot lower to maximize ROI. They will have some big rooms, but those are the draw to attract new residents, kind of like the gym and volleyball courts at an apartment complex.
But after the initial resource squeeze, where in effect everybody is poor and living in the cramped (but very nice!) working class slums (they’ll never be called that), move and more resources will get accessed, the end point of which is that the descendants of the first colonists will go fox hunting on their estates in orbit around Saturn.
And how that happens is just lots of people making daily business decisions and taking risks and financial gambles.
And likely by the time we’re building island 3 size space colonies O’Neill or otherwise we would likely have access to gigawatt class fusion rockets similar to the sunbird model Capable of reaching the moons of the gas giants in order to yes retrieve liquid nitrogen for transportation back to the inner Solar System for said space colonies.
Lets build wheels, within wheels. Lets say that you have 10 wheels. The inner most wheel, would have 1/10th of Earth’s gravity. The outer most wheel would have 1 G of Earth’s gravity. You start out by building the inner wheel first. People in their 50s, and older would settle there. These would be built in LEO. We can start out with inflatables, and later on rigid sections. With inflatables, there would be an inner wall, and outer wall. Fill the space between the two walls with dirt, and rocks mined on the Moon.
Over time, the inflatable part would be replaced by rigid structures.
Each wheel would be 480 feet across. From street level, to ceiling, it would be 400 feet. Below street level, 80 feet. That is where the transport tubes would be, and where the farms would be.
There would be 10 spokes. They would be about 200 feet across. Lots of apartments would be in the spokes. But only about 5 spokes would reach the center. The hub would be 800 feet wide, and 2,000 feet long. Lots of hotel rooms would be located in the hub. Along with movie, and TV production.
One of the spokes would contain the hospital, college, and medical school.
I don’t know what the population would be. But it would start out small, and grow larger, and larger, over time. It would also keep changing. One thing that would be great to have, is a large ramp going from one level, to another level. It would look like a hill. With trees, and a stream. The stream would carry water from one level, to a lower level.
One important element in a Van Braun style hub is cooling and airflow. The lighting is dumping heat into all the occupied areas, so it’s convenient to have that heat rise into spokes that radiate it into space and then return the cooler air in a loop driven by natural convection. The loop should create a natural breeze.
Well looking ahead if we have gigawatt class fusion rockets based on the sunbird burning helium 3 and deterium we would probably be harvesting the atmosphere of the ice giants Uranus and Neptune for helium 3. Higher concentration then Saturn much lower gravity and much less radiation so the people who will be building the island 3 would probably be more analogous to Donald Trump’s marilargo in space then low rent housing. Rich people throughout history have been known to dump money into real estate building huge idyllic Earth environment like space colonies might just be the investment for the space trillionaires. Modeled after the most beautiful land on Earth.
The Helium 3 magnates wealth would probably dwarf even the precious metal asteroid entrepreneurs. They could certainly afford such ambitious real estate projects. Although if it is a layered very large space colony with “decks” separated by an artificial HD “sky” some of the decks would be “1st class” for the super wealthy and their families/support staff/etc. The ones with the +100M high “ceiling”; room for tress/forests/parks etc. The other desks progressively less spacious/luxurious; human class systems playing out again in space.,
I think He-3 is kind of sketchy as a business venture because if you can build a fusion reactor that runs on He3, it probably won’t be long before you can build a better fusion reactor that can run on just hydrogen.
“..probably won’t be long before you can build a better fusion reactor that can run on just hydrogen.”
My understanding is that it’s vastly more difficult to do proton- proton fusion then helium 3 -deuterium fusion. You probably be more likely to do helium 3 fused with helium 3 followed by perhaps proton fusing with boron 11. Both while difficult are far more practical and likely to happen long before fusing hydrogen with hydrogen like the sun/stars. it’s a slow reaction that’s why stars can run for billions of years.
Helium 3 is worth about:
Helium-3 now commands a stable price of around $20 million per kilogram, said Meyerson. Interlune is sharply focused near-term on extracting Helium-3 for superconducting quantum computing applications. The Helium-3 itself is used to cool the devices to as close a temperature to absolute zero as possible. “Quantum computing is the key demand generator for us.”
That would be about $20K per gram; Gold is about $107 per gram
https://spacenews.com/interlune-plans-to-gather-scarce-lunar-helium-3-for-quantum-computing-on-earth/
Its only used now for relatively few uses; imagine if the Sunbird Fusion rockets burning De – He3 take off. Presumably terrestrial fusion reactors would follow. Massive spike in demand
Proton- Boron 11 fusion is the way to go. He3 is a distraction.
I’m not aware the Inertial Electrostatic fusion of P-B11 has been shown experimentally not to work.
“Proton- Boron 11 fusion is the way to go.”
Some of the fusion start up companies are working on proton boron 11 fusion I’m not sure how far away they are from actual break even. The Sunbird 2MW fusion rocket is supposed to be tested in orbit in 2027. Don’t know if any of those fusions start-ups are even thinking in terms of boron 11 proton fusion for space propulsion. I think they’re primarily interested in terrestrial power generation.
Getting the energy of the reaction out as neutrons is pretty horrible.
P-B11 gets you 3 helium 4 ions.
“Getting the energy of the reaction out as neutrons is pretty horrible.”
The deuterium helium 3 reaction the main reaction doesn’t produce neutrons however there is a side reaction when two deuteriums fuse that produce neutrons but the amount is vastly less than the deuterium tritium burn. The helium 3 helium 3 burn produces no neutrons and is much easier to ignite and has a higher energy than your proton boron 11 burn so it looks like helium 3 would be the fuel of choice for quite some time.
Also there is a side reaction in your Boron 11 proton fusion burn involving an alpha particle with boron 11 producing a neutron. Don’t know how that side reaction stacks up against the deuterium to deuterium side reaction from the much easier to ignite deuterium helium 3 reaction.
The Rider thesis that got him a PhD at MIT says you can’t get net energy out of P-B11 reactions due to bremsstrahlung losses in the plasma. That was back in 1995. Anything new in this area to revise that conclusion?
A pity because the alpha particles emitted are positively charged and can be coupled inductively to draw electricity directly out of the fusion reaction w/o an intermediary. The only waste is Helium. Set the reaction rate to operate at 60 per second and voila! This was Paul M. Koloc’s idea when he was still with us.
Finally, this posted. I have no idea what was in the content of the original on this that was causing trouble.
Like I said there are apparently some fusion startup companies working specifically on proton Boron 11 fusion. Can’t vouch for how viable they are and how soon they think they will reach break even. I would guess that a proton – boron 11 reactor would be bulkier heavier than a deuterium helium 3 reactor because of the higher temperature needed etc. Not an issue for terrestrial power generation perhaps but the power to weigh ratio would matter for space propulsion applications. Obviously the fuel Boron 11 is many orders of magnitude cheaper than He3; even if at some point we were mining the atmospheres of say Uranus or Neptune for said He3 to augment terrestrial sources. The lunar helium 3 is closer but the concentration are many orders of magnitude lower as well as the aggregate amount available.
What about Polywell fusion? Robert Bussard was working on that before he died. I think that should be studied more.
He notes he is not sure what will replace that vision of space as the future. The only concrete proposal he provides is to get rid of billionaires—or, rather, their billions, suggesting that an individual’s net worth be capped at $500 million: “there’s no reason we as a society have to put up with the continued existence of billionaires,” who he argues help “fringe philosophies” thrive. (In the book’s acknowledgement section, he thanks, ironically, the financial support he received from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a nonprofit established by a businessman who was a billionaire in today’s dollars at the time of his death.)
Of course, he would tilt at the rich guy windmill. I wonder how much of this space naysaying is just envious ideologues downplaying the field because there are rich guys in it.
<i“There’s no reason we as a society have to put up with the continued existence of billionaires” who he argues help “fringe philosophies.”
If that’s true, then I would argue with even more validity that there’s no reason why we as a society have to put up with envious scolds who presume the right to in any way limit the lives of any other person, a presumption born of the most fringe of all philosophies.
We should instead deport them to the Moon or Mars, and leave it to them to come up with ways to survive. That way, they’d never have to “put up with” either billionaires, or any of the other billions of people who are better at life than they are.
Well, that was a massive html mess…
At least it posted. 🙂
There is a considerable hypocrisy to Adam Becker’s (the author) stance. Not least is the justifying of a terrible policy on the basis of suppressing “fringe philosophies”. As you note, the author is yet another fringe philosophy. How much suppression of his philosophies is warranted when the fringe threat already justifies stealing trillions of dollars?
What makes it utter delusion is the assumption that his people will be in charge when the revolution comes. If that’s going to happen then why aren’t they in charge already?
My view is that every belief we have beyond those generated by our senses (like glowing red stove elements are hot) used to be a fringe belief at one time. Every one of those used to be believed only by a small group of people. If we suppress fringe beliefs, then where will future beliefs come from? It’s an astoundingly conservative argument when you think about it, which Becker probably ought to do at some point.
O’Neil’s mass drivers do exist, we know them by the sobriquet of rail gun. I read it near when it came out, even at the time I questioned the advisability of launching vast quantities of rocks, willy-nilly, in all directions. His centrifugal mass drivers were an especially silly idea.
Some of his other ideas were better and was one of the first to point out that long term occupancy in space required about a ton per square foot of fairly low atomic number material between the putative settler and the rest of the universe or some way to repair the inevitable genetic damage.
The Overview Effect is BS and the people who believe in it always portray it as exclusive enlightenment that always supports totalitarian leftism.
Yeah well, that is what Jeff votes for.
The only concrete proposal he provides is to get rid of billionaires—or, rather, their billions,
May I humbly offer my services?
If you “get rid of billionaires” all you would do is setup a new overclass (the government bureaucrats/politicians) that would be the de facto “owners” of their former largess. Most of said billionaires wealth is the stock value in the companies they own/created. You couldn’t hope to sell vast amounts of Tesla/Amazon/SpaceX/Microsoft stock (to pay the wealth tax) and recoup little more than pennies on the dollar. That is the stock value would collapse making it a non-starter as far as raising significant amounts of deficit reducing tax. The only logical strategy would be to compel the billionaires to sign over their shares to some kind of holding company administered by the federal government. In other words the result would be state ownership of the (significant) means of production; that is Communism. That is the mayoral candidate/Bernie Saunders/ the left’s goal all along.
Business is an informal separation of power that I believe has been instrumental in preserving the democracies of the world for centuries. Just like any other faction they can gain too much power. But it’s foolish for us to obsessively destroy business power and allow the factions of government to take over.
If Space Settlements (Colonies) ever happen, even planetary settlements, we need to prove the procreation of humans is possible in low gravity. People will never “go to space” in large numbers, they will be BORN there.
Space colonies won’t likely have low gravity presumably they’ll be designed to reflect the most ideal environments on earth gravity atmosphere greenery etc so hopefully that would address your concern. More Earth like than Earth would probably be a selling point for why people want to immigrate to the space colony.