Mankind Stands Not Only on The Edge of Space Frontier....

Mankind stands not only on the edge of space frontier but on the edge of history and whether Space Age frontier civilization (going supernova out) or a new Dark Age (Mankind's civilization going black hole into itself).


I say this as a seventy-years close student of history and the nature of things! I think and believe the owners and staff of Space.com need to better understand the importance and imperative to Mankind, and thus to civilization on Earth -- of civilization in general period, of better advocating, of pushing (of not sitting on it), a space faring civilization! Of pointing it (breakout) out, of pointing to it, in every area, every argument, every fight, everything! Remembering Stephen Hawking's prophesy of 1,000 years left at most to mass extinction if not done ASAP, that nothing whatsoever on Earth is more important, or more imperative, to Mankind's and civilization's survival now than getting and building momentum into its birth, its beginning Exodus, its exhaust of energies, out! Sorry if this offends anyone!
 
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Some space we can develop quickly. Observatories can be armoured from micro meteorites and cosmic rays. However that would make a Webb 6x more massive for meteorite armor; it is 3x more massive for cosmic ray armour and I haven't figured out how to catch the showers with cascade ceasing inclusions. The aperture itself is not shielded, so maybe 85% of a big one is shielded. Sensitive extremes of wavelength size are still vulnerable to damage. That is about the mass multiplier for a lagrange manufacturing station to precede an asteroid station. Cosmic radiation shielding isn't suggested near Earth but micrometeorite shielding yes. It will be tough to get good meteor samples to practise in situ with but there is lots a factory work to do: linear rails work better with bronzed Al and Ag. There are outgassing concerns and Tin and Silver are bad cosmic ray risks so an asteroid or Demios might be mostly shielded but the metal couldn't be repurposed elsewhere on those stations. Eventually we will get deep space for cold Niobium observatories and inertial positioning will be hard.
You don't need manned ion engines for the Demios route but single-use boosters would be nice. Silicon extraction will have to be tried eventually where lungs are. It is as simple as getting dense Si or iron ore, melting it to a sheet and shattering it, all unmanned. You may need to charge the powder as well as run a metal roller station and make induction motors and simple magnets. That is the horses, not Canada Arm.
 
An astroanut shouldn't need to clean the gunk out of air filters so there may be scope for roomba robotics. There is no easy in situ ore near Cis-Lunar space. Time saving implements are needed to schedule manufacturing at a Lagrange station. Some materials are economical in space only if longevity is desired. Pure metals are more resistant to impact and radiation. Sapphire can be stored and pressed as parts break down and 3d printing will advance. Large diameter structures can be assembled. It will have to be enough manufacturing activity to prepare for asteroid harvesting. I assume iron and silica are there and a dozen other useful substances. Vacuum processing of some materials leads to higher station structural quality so we are ideally making better stations with the equipment of our previous stations. Only for certain applications are vacuum layered substances much better than acrylic and things like superior air quality also factor into good lagrange stations.
 
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I'm constantly amazed that almost none of the illustrations of the Stanford Torus I've seen on the internet point out the fact that the living area of the colony is an inner rotating tube inside a protective outer non-rotating tube shell loaded at least five feet deep with excess materials from the construction of the colony. Five feet deep of such sludge protection is the sludge armored equivalent of the depth of Earth's protecting atmosphere. That outer non-rotating shell turns the Stanford Torus space colony into a customized gravitational manmade asteroid with a lot more, and more usable and better suited, living area for life than real thing asteroid caves could ever provide. The main material for it, until the asteroid belt becomes the main field of mining, would be material gunned to the L-point construction site shack / production plant by mass drivers. Eventually such construction production plants, in numbers of them, could mass produce the shells of such colonies among other custom designed in-space facilitations. On the multi-faceted surfaces of space, we will be able to do things a whole lot bigger and better than on the far more enclosed cave-like and less-dimensioned surface of the Earth's well.
 
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Following up on #4, it is stunning how little that frontier is understood, described, illustrated, and 3-d animated to present the picture of the enormous potentialities, the known possible realities, of that frontier.

The cost of it?! Almost no physicist, much less anyone in NASA or anywhere else understands the physic of beginning and gaining momentum in the right directions. After fifty years of momentum-less total authoritarian government crap in space, they still haven't a clue concerning what energizes, expands, and opens a frontier.

As I've said before, a few ships for the Portuguese in the 1400s and three ships for Columbus, came at an enormous expense for the parties involved. The hundreds to thousands of ships plying the maritime shipping lanes East and West, and the almost undreamed-of energies, creativity and wealth flowing into and out of the New World Frontiers a hundred later would have considered literally impossible a hundred years earlier. How did it happen? Momentum development and momentum gain in the right directions, something the [absolutist powers that be] obviously have had no conception of -- no mental width whatsoever to see and realize -- over the past fifty years!!!! Time, energies and trillions of dollars-worth in wealth absolutely wasted on an entropic treadmill in space going nowhere at all but into itself faster and ever faster. A [powers-that-be] made black hole.
 
Lagrange stations in lieu of asteroid ore can make their own meteorite armour. Maybe they can make solar panels, to make good ones only damaged along a cylinder is hard. Hot rolling pipes in vacuum works. Sapphire coatings of things like BeO cutlery and waste-water piping standardizes radiation-safe products. Pure metals can make the conductive portion of radar and radio arrays. Different vacuum hangars will try different outgassing materials like CNTs and copper. A cheap station 1-2 astronauts at Lagrange is maybe $400B. If it can manufacture 100"^3 of product a minute from bulk stuff Star-shipped to it should breakeven. The linear rails on the asteroid will need to be radiation protected. The asteroid station will be expensive. A cheaper version demonstrating maintenance-free parts and linear induction of deck-of-card sized pure metals layers and sapphire coating on non-toxic parts and a tiny electric cold roller is still best at a Lagrange point but maybe under a $billion$ and dockable to retrieve products. NASA will have their own asteroid way.
SpaceX enables perhaps the factory spread out on Demios and an asteroid but gets in situ earlier.
The asteroids enable an iron cargo ship linking one or two orbits away. Some of the processes we use there are applicable to Saturn like scooping fuel from Enceladus. I'd surrender the Lagrange IP 51% to NASA and keep 13%. An asteroid station I'd only need radiation armour and linear rails to be mine. Demios I'd only need to help with initial in situ. I assume with the hit and miss nature of asteroid resources and various extraction strategies it is ideal for private USA space but power from Earth or Enceladus or Triton is needed for comfortable amneties not till 2040's there.
 
NASA has some of the best artwork on its website concerning space colonies. Do a search on Space Colonization NASA.

Some of the best books on in-space colonization are Gerard K. O'Neill's 'The High Frontier' (his three "island" colonies I think are either too gravitationally distorted for city-state building in space or simply too large to be really necessary), T. A. Heppenheimer's 'Colonies In Space' which is my favorite and which I've discovered the National Space Society has a complete e-book copy freely available for general reading on their website. G, Harry Stine's two volume set, Parts I and II, 'The Third Industrial Revolution', John Lewis's 'Mining the Sky', and NASA's pointers to even more (most of which probably has little to do with anything like a Biblical 'Exodus' of mankind or similar American and Western Civilization historical frontier free style pursuit of space frontier, on their website. George Orwell and Aldous Huxley couldn't get any closer to a Big Brother, and to a caste class of human structuring, future than NASA.

Anyway, there is a lot available, though not a lot of it is rich in human [back to the future] frontier. Once we are out and gone far enough to begin branching out in more ways and dimensions than one, we will discover aliens whose evolutions had and have nothing to do with stone-monolithic spikes but have vastly branched out in complexity and chaos (in variations) away from trunks like any other natural forms of life.

All the stone-monolith Utopias of life, we will find, went, and always go, extinct for being uniformly monolithically (inflexibly) anti-survival of life. Too insularly perfect and unadaptable for any expansive frontier universe life!
 
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"All the stone-monolith Utopias of life, we will find, went, and always go, extinct for being uniformly monolithically (inflexibly) anti-survival of life. Too insularly perfect and unadaptable for any expansive frontier universe life!"

So far, regarding the human species of life, the above (stone monolithic Utopia) does not describe it. We may have a mostly uniform physical structure, but there are far too many of life's variations, and of life's complexity, creativity, and chaotic energies, in the one physical structure, the one basket of all eggs, for the Earth to be enough anymore. All life on Earth is in its totality of a vastly wide branched tree of life, spatial life. But the only single Earth species that is spatial is the apex of the pyramid, the whole pyramid of life in one basket of all eggs, the human species. That makes it two equals but opposites, Either the carrier species out, or a destroyer species in. And, probably, a species the Nature of Life has designed with a self-destruct mechanism built into it if it can't or won't do what it was evolved for . . . so to be replaced, ruthlessly, by one that can and will do the job (that can and will construct space colony "Noah's Arks" out to the seas of space if there is still time).
---------------------

There are four fundamental forces:
1) The gravitational force
2) The weak force
3) The electromagnetic force
4) The strong binding force

There are two fundamental forces:
5) The gravitational / antigravitational strong binding force (GSBF)
6) The electroweak force (EWF)

There is one fundamental force:
7) The life / antilife force (fundamental binary base2): nonlocal infinite '0' (null unity) and/or local finite '1' (unity).

Seven fundamental forces, not four.

(Philosophically stating that last (the 7th) and apex of the pyramiding, borrowing from Edmund Burke: "When bad combines (the antilife stone monolithic Utopia), good must associate (the branching tree of life (of Infinite MULTIVERSE Universe)), or crumble to piecemeal dust; unpitied natural sacrifice to a contemptible -- though still itself a natural -- model.)

Now to wait for someone else to tell me there are no such things existing as observable paralleling universes.
 
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Catastrophe

"Science begets knowledge, opinion ignorance.
I believe that all are able to understand that total resources divided by total population = average resources per capita.

Take a trivial example. Buy a pack of jam tarts, and each will probably sit on a round cup of aluminium, as well as plastic packaging.. There are important uses of aluminium. This is not one of them. Go back a few hundred years, and there was enough aluminium to supply the future population for a very long time. Not any more. The more alumina used, the scarcer and more difficult to replace this metal. Also, the process is energy intensive. The higher the demand, the more difficult the extraction and production becomes. Exponentially so. And don't forget that plastics are made from natural oil and gas, irreplaceable, and dating back to sedimentation of organic remains in the Carboniferous Period.

Keep burning carbon to CO2, using oxygen, destroy the rain forests which convert CO2 back to oxygen (via photosynthesis) and we will run short of oxygen to breathe,

Don't worry, some may shout, there is plenty of everything left. Really? I count myself lucky. I am 84 and do not have a plurality of offspring to worry about. Otherwise, I would be seriously worried about food, energy and raw materials running short for them. However, in the final analysis, we all have to make up our own minds on such issues.


Cat :) :) :)



Edit: clarification.
 
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Anyone with limited intelligence and a modicum of arithmetic should be able to understand that total resources divided by total population = average resources per capita.

Take a trivial example. Buy a pack of jam tarts, and each will probably sit on a round cup of aluminium, as well as plastic packaging.. There are important uses of aluminium. This is not one of them. Go back a few hundred years, and there was enough aluminium to supply the future population for a very long time. Not any more. The more alumina used, the scarcer and more difficult to replace this metal. Also, the process is energy intensive. The higher the demand, the more difficult the extraction and production becomes. Exponentially so. And don't forget that plastics are made from natural oil and gas, irreplaceable, and dating back to sedimentation of organic remains in the Carboniferous Period.

Keep burning carbon to CO2, using oxygen, destroy the rain forests which convert CO2 back to oxygen (via photosynthesis) and we will run short of oxygen to breathe,

Don't worry, some shout, there is plenty of everything left. Really? I count myself lucky. I am 84 and do not have a plurality of offspring to worry about. Otherwise, I would be seriously worried about food, energy and raw materials running short for them. If you have loved ones to worry about, then I suggest you might like to consider these issues. Changes may reach us sooner than you think.

Cat :)
Are you addressing me Cat? You are eight years older than me and I have seven grandchildren and, to date, six great-grandchildren! I'm an intuitive visual mathematician by testing and have been a close student of history and the nature of things for seventy of my seventy-six years. If it is I whom you are addressing above, you are making a huge mistake. Please don't think you can patronize me about the physics of what is at this time (a closed / closing system) and what isn't (an open / opening system)! I can literally see it, Cat, which, I feel sorry for you if I read you right -- I may not be reading you right-- very obviously you can't see!

The Earth with its overall resources could support a hundred and more times the population of humans, a hundred and more times advanced in complexity, structure and infrastructure, energies, and reach, than it is supporting now, but not, I repeat NOT! in the confines it isn't supporting the hundred and more times less it is supporting right now.

Are you confused?! You don't have the mind, a mind's eye, for the physics of closed and open systems, then, and you never in your eighty-four years of life understood the history of a frontier humanity braking out and expanding upon Earth! It has now reached limits! But not even close to the limits of the Earth's means! Only the limits, the invincible Iron Curtain bubbles (plural) limits, within a [master link] closed systemic Iron Curtain bubble which if and when it is popped by breakout from the Earth, pops the invincibility of the barrier physics walls of the Iron Curtain bubbles within. In other words, go outside, expand outside, to better the mankind, the system, that stays within the Earth's confines and the mankind of Exodus as well.
 
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I think comfortably about 5B but up to 13B means less forests and afforested biomes. Giving people reprap mansions and university for no children should work. Aluminum for example is good for mag lev when coated w/ bronze. But copper outgases in vacuum. Silver works. Boehmite is cheap enough from China and it can be ball milled if the goal is Corundum. Materials tend to get oxides in atmosphere. So a quick hermetic chain of metals bound for space would be ideal. They get a few oxide layers hermetically but can be surface melted rather than volume melted if only a bit rusty.
My technology is best to open up Lagrange points. Linear rails are all I really need to cash in on the asteroids. It will be hard to eliminate electronics and software glitches but if Gemini-like controls can be made workable or I can give decisions over to sensor networks and neuro-imaging astronauts time will be there to quality-control parts. 1970 Soviets were missing coatings on their metals. I'm willing to give away Sapphire coatings and hermetic seals (not UHV easily) just to develop L points; seems my ticket to the ice moons is upgrading space manufacturing to be L-Point micro-meteorite resilient and making 8ftx8ftx8ft product per week for L-point usage at 1st.
 
We could easily produce many times Earth's virtual 2-dimensional surface and few hundred feet of its atmospheric amount in Stanford Torus L-point and planet Venus orbital space colonies using resources of the Moon, near-Earth and near-Venus asteroids, and resource [salting] from the Earth once we've tooled up mass production facilities from producing lesser spin gravity stations and other custom facilitations in space. Then would come transplanting a few of the space colonies from L-point orbit to Mars orbit to finalize the survivability and permanency of Mars colonization. Then the asteroid belt: not in it!!! of course, but new solar orbits to this near side of it, close enough, and mining and utilizing its vastness of asteroid material resource for an inner ring belt of Stanford Torus and other type colonies and custom facilitations. Then . . . to the colonization of the orbits of the far planets utilizing the even greater vastness of their material resource.

I also made a big mistake in my thinking about O'Neill Island colony versions 2 and 3, that I will admit to here! I still maintain they are too big, too cumbersome, too vulnerable to the space environment in the long run, and totally unnecessary for human city-state and other custom use human facilitation which could be housed in lesser spaces and those rabbit hole space islands multiplied many times over. But for facilitating housing Earth wildlife and sea-life in suitably large environmental Noah Ark-like facilitations, they would do near perfectly for the job off Earth. Stanford Torii in multitudes for the independences (plural) needed by humans, and O'Neill cylinder colony 2 and 3's for wildlife and sea-life habitats where independent human divisions, human variations and freedoms, and thus human separations for internal and external reasons and protections are not so vitally necessary.

Yet if the vulnerabilities and risks regarding larger colony island stations are acceptable to a class of a million or more humans in one of those 2-cylinder cylinder types . . . they would definitely not be denied the building of the then larger more crowded type of city-state colony.... A space frontier benefit of the increased freedom of "to each their own."
 
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Catastrophe

"Science begets knowledge, opinion ignorance.
Atlan, I was not addressing you or referring to any specific person, living or otherwise. It is my sworn intention never to criticise any person, as I believe that we (humans in general) should treat all our fellow humans and their right to their opinions with respect. We may disagree with some opinions, and we may address these, but never comment unfavourably on any person. Any remarks were intended as being of a strictly general nature.

My attitude is exemplified in my quotation:

https://www.shmoop.com › quotes › never-good-war-...
"There never was a good war, or a bad peace." · Context. This line was written by Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Sir Joseph Banks (July 27, 1983). · Where you' ...

at the bottom of my posts. You may rest assured that I will never knowingly criticize any poster here and, if you think that I have, then I apologise for any misunderstanding you may have accrued.

I am a member of several book clubs, which include other published authors, and none of us misconstrue disagreement with ideas expressed as being personal comment. This is enshrined within the ethos of the clubs. Please understand this as being an ongoing commitment on my part.

Cat :)
 
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Cat, my "Like" to you above is a friendly acknowledgement and a thank you. As to what Ben Franklin said, he was famous for saying things he had no intention of meaning beyond the instant of his saying it. For instance, like Winston Churchill he was a late-night person, and no early riser if he could help it. Yet one of his most famous quotes was in favor of just the opposite. As a great actor orator and writer, much like Cicero among others, he well knew how to play to whatever the particular audience.

Your continuing quote from Franklin implies that like evil and World War enabler Neville Chamberlain you never understood another fellow countryman of yours, Edmund Burke. To wit: "When bad men combine, the good must associate; otherwise, they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." ("For evil to win all that's got to happen is for good men to do nothing.")

But though such is borderline germane to the subject, it is not the physics of the object reality of supernova-like bubble bursting open (opening) system and the black hole-like bubble-barriers invincibility within closed (closing) system. Out turning, out breeding, system(s) versus in turning, in breeding, system(s). The Earth has plentiful excesses of frontier resources that could support -- to mean help to support -- an enormously larger and more advanced human population and structural / infrastructural system of energetically expanding complexity of Civilization. But, as I said, not on the Earth! Impossible on the Earth! It is only, solely, in the growing synergistic symbiosis of exchanges of frontier energies with expanding outland frontiers, that the homeland Earth grows in an in-land frontier kind of benefit, most especially including, as Stephen Hawking saw too, a benefit of growing internal mass energetic space and time frontier unknown and impossible of being, of existing, before the momentum build of outland frontier breakout and explosive expansion!

It can be a bitter pill sometimes to have the mind's eye . . . sight . . . of an "intuitive visual mathematician" (a seer into complexities and chaos)! Though I hope never to be without the lifelong built-in supports as I continue, hopefully, to age beyond my own 76 years. I haven't fought and won enough battles yet because of it. The only ones I want to lose, (don't mind losing) if I have any to lose (shudder), are those with my wife partner of more than 55 years....
 
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Catastrophe

"Science begets knowledge, opinion ignorance.
Atlan: Please take the following as entirely general, with no specific connection to any person, alive or dead, unless specifically alluded to. I include alive or dead, because many quotes are hundreds or thousands of years old.

As you know, there is a great diversity of opinion - I am almost tempted by the word infinite.

Perhaps I, as a scientist, should refrain from literary quotations, as I have no idea what might have been said by any person under different circumstances. Thank you for pointing this out. It is an entirely valid point. In future I will try to express myself in my own words, for which I must take full responsibility.

Cat :)
 
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When Sir Thomas More wrote his famous book, 'Utopia', circa 1512CE, writing it as a nostalgia for 'Camelot'-like Middle Ages feudalism, he'd seen his world coming to an end since the 1400s with the outflow of ships East and West from what had been a more or less isolated, insular, island Europe in the universe. First the Crusades, then the Rennaissance, then the growing outflows of ships and people to New Worlds, all by itself a growing synergistic exchange of mass energies, changing his beloved Old World (as he saw it) to some New Frontier, impossible of existing before, that he did not like.

Can the changes that were happening to the combustion engine of More's world circa 1512CE from ever growing exhaust outflows, and what will be happening to our world with a growing exhaust of energies to Space Frontier and Space Age, be described in sheer physics? Here is possibly one way a little different from what I just now described here:


Possibly one way. Open (opening) systemic physics, versus closed systemic physics. When worlds collide (when universes collide).
 
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The dynamic economics of the Space Frontier, the dynamic economy of the Space Frontier, and therefore the vast majority (though not 100% but close enough to 100%) of life and effort and travel and colonization (habitation), in the Space Frontier, throughout the Space Age, thus for all future time to come, will be centered in and upon the 'High Frontier' surface of Space itself!
 
I was out and about in the city this evening. My thoughts turned to a "what if" scenario for this very city and its people if we had beginning colonization of the Space Frontier in progress right now. Spin gravity space stations. Shuttles plying regularly to and from orbit. Mining facilities on the Moon busy shooting ores to cloud city-like toroidal colony construction facilities orbiting the L-points. Industries and emigration expanding there in Space. The frontier potential of the Space Frontier and Space Age having an aura coming home to roost of energy and growing potential surrounding and filling every man, woman, and child living in this city, this nation, and everywhere else on Earth. This, my very city on Earth, then being more and more a frontier city as a historic homelands' energetic 'return' from expanding frontier, again coming home to roost (that same Space Frontier Space Age of opening; homing there, homing here, quantum entangling).
 
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You may not think this applies concerning the Space Frontier and the future of Mankind, but it applies only too well!



People have not a clue that you cannot hold dynamic civilization together unless it is frontier energized civilization . . . fertile, vital, energetic, energetically growing, energetically mind expanding, expansively mass genius loaded! The old truisms, sayings, holds true: "Birth or die!" "Grow or die!" Life is a polluting star stuff combustion engine that needs and has to have an exhaust port, an exhaust pipeline, out in expansionary frontiers or it will go extinct one way or another (such as from ebbs and flows of negative frontier entropic chaos-cross-currents of mass (old) life destroyed in mass (new) life tidal waving within (external expansionary frontier is, overall, far more benign, a far smoother running engine, far more civilized in giving and forgiving to both new and old in the overall expansionism -- a growing room (a longer time) for all -- at the same time))!

New Life would / will find a cruel and brutal (as too many people would think and feel today) way to do what the old life would not do . . . providing all life is not made extinct from the outside first.
 
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