Humanity abandoning planets, living in space.

[Cao Cao]

Why the hell would we bother?

Some reasons :

Effectively unlimited space for growth.

Unlimited? You need vast amounts of resources for that. It's not like cold hard vacuum is very livable, and giant, rotating, lovely park and sunny beach on the inside space colonies would probably take a long time to build.

[Patrick Degan]

Why the hell would we bother?

Some reasons :

Effectively unlimited space for growth.

Unlimited? You need vast amounts of resources for that.

Energy: a sun which has five billion years left to it in the main-sequence stage.

Minerals: moons and an asteroid belt with enough metals to sustain a human civilisation for 50000 millenia at minimum.

It's not like cold hard vacuum is very livable, and giant, rotating, lovely park and sunny beach on the inside space colonies would probably take a long time to build.

So do most cities. What's your point?

[Cao Cao]

Some reasons :

Effectively unlimited space for growth.

Unlimited? You need vast amounts of resources for that.

Energy: a sun which has five billion years left to it in the main-sequence stage.

Minerals: moons and an asteroid belt with enough metals to sustain a human civilisation for 50000 millenia at minimum.

Right but it'd be more efficient to simply build bases on these moons and the larger asteroids and make habitats there rather than rely on space stations.[/quote]

It's not like cold hard vacuum is very livable, and giant, rotating, lovely park and sunny beach on the inside space colonies would probably take a long time to build.

So do most cities. What's your point?

That it would be quite uncomfortable for a long time.

[Patrick Degan]

Unlimited? You need vast amounts of resources for that.

Energy: a sun which has five billion years left to it in the main-sequence stage.

Minerals: moons and an asteroid belt with enough metals to sustain a human civilisation for 50000 millenia at minimum.

Right but it'd be more efficient to simply build bases on these moons and the larger asteroids and make habitats there rather than rely on space stations.

No it wouldn't. Minimal/negligible gravity means you could not sustain a crew on the surface for years at a stretch, so you'd still have to rotate personnel either from Earth or an orbital colony spun to provide 1g.

It's not like cold hard vacuum is very livable, and giant, rotating, lovely park and sunny beach on the inside space colonies would probably take a long time to build.

So do most cities. What's your point?

That it would be quite uncomfortable for a long time.

Define "long time". Starting the first colonies would take two or three centuries, but as an orbital civilisation grows in population, bases, and scope, resources become more concentrated. And in terms of thosands of millenia, the initial city-building period is a blink-of-an-eye by contrast.

[Cao Cao]

Energy: a sun which has five billion years left to it in the main-sequence stage.

Minerals: moons and an asteroid belt with enough metals to sustain a human civilisation for 50000 millenia at minimum.

Right but it'd be more efficient to simply build bases on these moons and the larger asteroids and make habitats there rather than rely on space stations.

No it wouldn't. Minimal/negligible gravity means you could not sustain a crew on the surface for years at a stretch, so you'd still have to rotate personnel either from Earth or an orbital colony spun to provide 1g.

Wasn't really thinking about the long term effects of gravity.
Point conceeded.

Define "long time". Starting the first colonies would take two or three centuries, but as an orbital civilisation grows in population, bases, and scope, resources become more concentrated. And in terms of thosands of millenia, the initial city-building period is a blink-of-an-eye by contrast.

Well, I was musing on the short term benefits, as in humanity wouldn't see this unlimited growth potential in many generations and by then who knows what advances we would make.

[His Divine Shadow]

I've always looked at this the culture way, space habitats are the future and planets will become more like protected habitats.

[Cao Cao]

I've always looked at this the culture way, space habitats are the future and planets will become more like protected habitats.

What, no nice civilized planets to glass in a display of awesome, obviously-compensating-for-something power?
What a boring place, this Culture.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Unlimited? You need vast amounts of resources for that. It's not like cold hard vacuum is very livable, and giant, rotating, lovely park and sunny beach on the inside space colonies would probably take a long time to build.

There are plenty of comets,asteroids, and low gravity moons that can be easily used for resources, not to mention 8 planets nobody's using at the moment. It may not be very concentrated, but the resources are there.

Paradisical giant space stations will no doubt be time and resource intensive to build, but it's not like people down here generally live like that anyway. Smaller, simpler ones will no doubt be the majority, rather like most people live in apartments and not mansions on the beach.

[His Divine Shadow]

I've always looked at this the culture way, space habitats are the future and planets will become more like protected habitats.

What, no nice civilized planets to glass in a display of awesome, obviously-compensating-for-something power?
What a boring place, this Culture.

Yeah, buncha fucking space prudes really...

[Companion Cube]

Minerals: moons and an asteroid belt with enough metals to sustain a human civilisation for 50000 millenia at minimum.

That's fascinating; did this come from a particular source? (Not doubting, just curious)

[SyntaxVorlon]

The asteroid belt is made up primarily with materials that are typical in the cores of planets. So plenty of iron, nickel and so on. And probably a fuck ton of Uranium.

[Darth Tanner]

Also the majority of a planets minerals are in the core, the best way to access them would be to strip mine the enitre planet (like the Empire told the public the Death Star was for), which would probalby render it rather uninhabitable.

If we abandoned planets to travel the stars in vast ships, sucking resources of planets dry, we would be a lot like the aliens in Independance Day.

Also we are eventually going to have to abandon this planet, or atleast its surface becasue of global warming/ice age. Butgoing underground will probably be a LOT cheaper and easier than going into space.

[Patrick Degan]

Minerals: moons and an asteroid belt with enough metals to sustain a human civilisation for 50000 millenia at minimum.

That's fascinating; did this come from a particular source? (Not doubting, just curious)

Jerry Pournelle's A Step Farther Out, in which he discusses issues ranging from space colonisation to fusion power to tapping black holes for power to writing plausible SF stories; most of the book is scientific speculation written around 1980 or thereabouts.

[Aeolus]

Minerals: moons and an asteroid belt with enough metals to sustain a human civilisation for 50000 millenia at minimum.

That's fascinating; did this come from a particular source? (Not doubting, just curious)

Jerry Pournelle's A Step Farther Out, in which he discusses issues ranging from space colonisation to fusion power to tapping black holes for power to writing plausible SF stories; most of the book is scientific speculation written around 1980 or thereabouts.

You know my brother gave me a copy of that years ago I need to reread it.

[Vendetta]

Yes, I can easily see a mostly itinerant human race.

The issue is this:

Even if we find planets we can comfortably live on, it will take several lifetimes to reach them. Forget all the happy sci-fi thoughts about FTL travel, or even near c travel, we don't have the energy or materials to do it. We need generation ships. And that means that any long range space ships we build absolutely need to be self sufficient.

And if we're building ships to be self sufficient in provision, equipment construction, and material and energy acquisition, it doesn't so much matter if there is a planet at the end of their journey.

[Darth Tanner]

good point

unless we can use some form of hibernation/stasis pods for the journey.

[Molyneux]

Yes, I can easily see a mostly itinerant human race.

The issue is this:

Even if we find planets we can comfortably live on, it will take several lifetimes to reach them. Forget all the happy sci-fi thoughts about FTL travel, or even near c travel, we don't have the energy or materials to do it. We need generation ships. And that means that any long range space ships we build absolutely need to be self sufficient.

And if we're building ships to be self sufficient in provision, equipment construction, and material and energy acquisition, it doesn't so much matter if there is a planet at the end of their journey.

We may not need generation ships if we manage to extend the human lifespan to near-indefinite; we'd still need long-term self-sufficient ships, but they could have, say, ten or twenty people as crew instead of hundreds.

[His Divine Shadow]

Well if we as a species want to expand across the universe we'll want hundreds, no thousands and thousands per ship so that they can start new foundations whereever they settle.

[drachefly]

Wouldn't some sort of effective radiation-shielding have to be devised to make up for the lack of a planet's magnetosphere?

Its the atmosphere that does most of our radiation-shielding, not the magnetic field.

Patrick, about the space elevators; what do you think of the rotavator concept? Its cable is only 300 km long. (if you don't know about it, I have a writeup on Everything2 outlining the concept)