Earth is a spaceship like the ISS — let me explain

I notice the financial costs of running the Earth like a space station are not mentioned at all.

We have, or at least had, a functioning ecosystem that we did not have to run for ourselves. But, we have severely damaged it, if not already destroyed it, by increasing our population beyond the "carrying capacity" where what we use gets naturally recycled to let us use it again.

And, it was resilient, before we killed so much of the natural vegetation and animals. Now we can no longer "live off the land" in its natural state. We must have farming of vegetable and animal foods to sustain our large population. Which displaces the natural system. And, is more sensitive to disruptions. And costs more energy per person.
 
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Oct 22, 2023
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I notice the financial costs of running the Earth like a space station are not mentioned at all.

We have, or at least had, a functioning ecosystem that we did not have to run for ourselves. But, we have severely damaged it, if not already destroyed it, by increasing our population beyond the "carrying capacity" where what we use gets naturally recycled to let us use it again.

And, it was resilient, before we killed so much of the natural vegetation and animals. Now we can no longer "live off the land" in its natural state. We must have farming of vegetable and animal foods to sustain our large population. Which displaces the natural system. And, is more sensitive to disruptions. And costs more energy per person.
I do not believe that the cost is a prime point. The real cost is the survival of this planet. We already have triple the number of people onboard and that cost already spent is the trees and grass needed to filter the air we require to exist. With the population we have,the housing needed and the number of factories and covered parking areas and paved roadways already required to provide the comforts and leisures we believe we need exceeds the ability to maintain balance. In my lifetime I have seen the world population of 2.2 billion raise to today 8.2 billion. That is 4 times in 90 years. That is not sustainable at our rate of breeding we will exhaust our planet's ability to maintain liveability. What to do is up to the present population to decide if we will live or die: decide now or all is lost.
 
May 22, 2021
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I don't see the ISS as a closed system. Without frequent resupply any habitat therein would soon expire.

As for the earth, yes it is a spaceship and we are, in Zefram Cochran's words "all astronauts on some kind of star trek.
 
I agree with you point about population expansion. The problem is how to get people to stop it. The economists like to point out that birth rates fall below replacement levels in "developed" countries. But, they fail to note that the populations of those countries still keep increasing due to in-migration. People in less developed countries, and the poor is some developed countries, do reproduce substantially faster than replacement - and then go to the developed countries "for opportunities".

So, it seems very questionable if we can make enough "development fast enough ro everybody to be happy enough where they are born to stay there and not increase their populations. Or, will the population increase faster than we can pull people up out of "poverty"?

So far, poverty seems to be winning. Which means population will probably not decrease until there are circumstances so dire that people die in large numbers, often. It would be nice if humans could learn to be smarter in a collective way. But, most seem to be focused on short-term interests, often just survival, now.
 
Constructing artificially gravitied stations and colonies is the one and only way to open the Space Frontier to hundreds and thousands and millions and billions and breakout in expansion from the Earth! Which is why it hasn't been done, won't be done, or allowed to be done by the totalitarian state ruling space and, therefore, ruling Earth!!!!

All it will take for speed in opening the frontier is an artificial gravity beginning out there! The very equal of discovering gold!
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"The secret of wealth is human capital. And the secret of human capital is a work ethic that scorns sponging" . . . and scorns mass "busy work." Scorning treadmills and forced running faster and ever faster in place to 'Nowhere' (Earth and Earth orbital 'Utopia')! A meteor burning brightest on its way to ground and 'Apocalypse'!
 
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Artificial gravity is easily achieved through spinning. The problem is Coriolis forces but they are brought down to reasonable levels by having a large diameter. About 1000 feet is needed. This can give 1 g, which is needed for bone stability. One cannot easily make such a large diameter cylinder because the walls would have to be too thick to hold the pressure in. Only about 100 feet is reasonable, cost wise.

One solution is to take existing habitats, tie them together with a 1000' long cable and get them spinning. You can add habitats and cables as needed. No limit to it. It also avoids the problem of having one single giant ecosystem that might lose its air all at once.
 
Regarding rotating space stations. I don't expect to see either 1.000 foot diameter spheres (or disks) or separate modules cabled together across their mutual center of mass. I think the toroidal designs we have been seeing in fiction since the 1950s are more likely. Think "wagon wheel" with some hollow spokes to a central tube, spinning around a virtual "axle".

But, if anything is spinning in space fast enough to create 1 g of artificial gravity at its edge, it will create a docking problem for space craft to connect to it. In "2001 A Space Odyssey" a big space craft comes in on the axis of rotation, spinning at the same rate as the space station. Doable, but limited to 2 spacecraft at a time. And, think about what the people on that spacecraft will experience trying to debark and make their way to the 1g wheel part of the station. The room will be spinning, literally, on the spacecraft and any tube leading from it. I expect that would be disorienting, especially when a person is not exactly on the axis of the station's spin. People who are prone to "sea sickness" would probably get a much more serious version, and it would probably come on almost instantaneously.

The other way to do it would be for the spacecraft to dock on the outside circumference of the wheel. It should not be too difficult to maneuver a spacecraft to do that - it would be like a fighter pilot doing what is a 2 g nose-up maneuver on Earth, but it would only feel like a 1 g maneuver at the space station. When aligned, the spacecraft could be mechanically clamped to the space station, much like the capsules are now connected to the ISS. But, doing that with any non-zero mass spacecraft would cause the space station to have a shift in the center of their collective masses and that would alter the way the space station spins, at least to some degree. The "gravity" inside the space station would develop a "wobble" effect.

The only way I can think of to mitigate that effect is to have a counterbalancing mass, located on the opposite side of the space station from the docking port, that could be moved to recenter the net center of mass to the physical center of the toroid of the station. Seems doable. But, I expect people inside the station would be able to tell when a spacecraft docks, without looking out through a window.
 
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