The main thing about cars is that they take you exactly where you want
to go exactly when you want to go there. You don't need to own a car to
do that, so long as the cabs as cheap.

On Monday, July 8, 2002, at 05:09 PM, Lucio de Souza Coelho wrote:

>> I'm not so sure that we've reached the ultimate level of comfort and
>> convencience with our car culture.
The International Space Station (ISS) most important legacy may be
jump-starting space tourism. Consider: the first space tourist, Dennis
Tito, was supposed to go to the Soviet era Mir space station. Under
pressure from NASA, Russia de-orbited the Mir which resulted in Mr. Tito
going to the ISS instead. Now the Mir was old, smelly, crowded and
probably not all that nice. The ISS was brand new, shinny, much more
roomy, etc. Mr. Tito came back to Earth with glowing accounts of how
great space is. Would his experience have been as good on Mir?

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

On Tuesday, July 9, 2002, at 07:29 AM, panamabob wrote:

>> Nope. Nitrogen is not a heavier gas then air.
>
> Curious, wonder why its used in packaging to evacuate air in
> preservation?
>

It's pretty much inert - N2 doesn't like to react with much of
anything. No chemical reactions leads to good preservation.

The materials in one asteroid (the largest ) are sufficient to make
orbital space colonies with ~500 times the surface area of the Earth in
usable real estate. See http://lifesci3.arc.nasa.gov/SpaceSettlement/
for details.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

Haha, Yes it is inert, but the funny part is that its used to evacuate
OXYGEN air, etc that is oxidizing what ever product is sealed up.

For a fire to be a fire, it must have three things, heat, fuel, oxygen.
remove any of the three and the fire doesn't exist, instantly. If nitrogen
was much lighter than air it would not work to evacuate air in a bottle or
pouch...as it happens at equal temps nitrogen has specific gravity of .967
compaired to "1.0" of air and around 1.16 for oxygen ...but cooling it a bit
would help it drop down.

no biggy, but since CO2 levels is not something you want to mess with
(usually less than 1%) and nitrogen (N2) is around 78% that it would seem
Nitrogen would be a less critical gas to have circulating.... (oxygen is
around 21% and other trace gases make up the rest) or am I screwy here? :-)

On Monday, July 8, 2002, at 11:33 AM, Brad Walsh wrote:

> Can we make vehicles so
> non-polluting that we can coexist with them in our sealed atmosphere?

Yes. Electric car emit essentially nothing.

> Do we
> want that much surface area given over to asphalt and overpasses?

A driverless car system uses far less asphalt. You don't need all that
parking space at every location people might want to leave cars.

> Are
> electric cars just too darn tame for some people?

Electric cars have terrific acceleration -- generally much better than
normal cars. The batteries limit range, but with better electric
storage technology driven by cell phone and laptops, this problem should
be put to rest long before we build space colonies.

The International Space Station (ISS) most important legacy may be
jump-starting space tourism. Consider: the first space tourist, Dennis
Tito, was supposed to go to the Soviet era Mir space station. Under
pressure from NASA, Russia de-orbited the Mir which resulted in Mr. Tito
going to the ISS instead. Now the Mir was old, smelly, crowded and
probably not all that nice. The ISS was brand new, shinny, much more
roomy, etc. Mr. Tito came back to Earth with glowing accounts of how
great space is. Would his experience have been as good on Mir?

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

On Monday, July 8, 2002, at 11:33 AM, Brad Walsh wrote:

> You're not going to
> impress your gal with a souped up muffler-less muscle car if they're
> banned--is that what you want?

No. I want to get from here to there when I want to go.

> If so, what about those that disagree with
> you? Does the physics of an O'Neill cylinder allow other alternatives,
> like
> maybe elevators to and from a spine of monkey bars running through the
> weightless zone at the center of the cylinder?
>

Basically there are two choices outside of walking range: 1) a centrally
controlled mass transit system where an individual and/or committee
decides when and where the vehicles go, and 2) an individually
controlled system where each individual controls when and where the
vehicle they are using goes. The car implements the second and is very
popular with the users where available. Current cars have problems
related to emissions and excessive land use. The emissions can be
eliminated by electric cars and the land use problem substantially
reduced by automated driving.

Space tourism could be our ticket to the stars. Save your pennies,
suborbital flights for $100,000 may start in 2005! See
http://www.spaceadventures.com/suborbital for details.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

On Monday, July 8, 2002, at 04:36 PM, victoriatangoman wrote:

> I believe it would be more likely that orbital societies will
> evolve. They'll start small, with everything within walking
> distance, and with no public transportation. As their size grows, I
> think the first step will be some form of mass transit.

I see no particular reason to believe mass transit will be the choice
for every colony, or even most. My guess is that the personal freedom
to go when and where you want will be important to people, and they will
develop systems to do just that. This implies vehicles sized for one or
a few people under occupant control that travel on prepared
right-of-ways that go pretty much (although not quite) everywhere. In
other words, roads and cars.

The dinosaurs were destroyed by an asteroid because they weren't
space-faring. It's almost as if Gaia then thought "Well, dinosaurs
worked pretty well, but space-faring is necessary. Maybe I'll should
try mammals this time." Humanity is now developing systems to detect and
deflect asteroids, and could build orbital space colonies to spread
beyond Earth to insure life would survive a planetary catastrophe.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

I couldn't agree more with Al Globus' point (2). Within a very few
number of years, people will WEAR powerful computers and communication
equipment everywhere they go. The revolution has already started with
cell phones and PDAs and pagers and so forth. These devices will, in the
future, allow us to "call for a car" wherever we are in the civilized
world. The car will come to us and obediently take us where we want to
go. We won't drive the car --- it will drive us.

Ron
******

Al Globus
07/10/02 12:37 PM
Please respond to spacesettlers

To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
cc:
Subject: Re: [spacesettlers] Re: Transportation within a habitiat

...
Basically there are two choices outside of walking range: 1) a centrally
controlled mass transit system where an individual and/or committee
decides when and where the vehicles go, and 2) an individually
controlled system where each individual controls when and where the
vehicle they are using goes. The car implements the second and is very
popular with the users where available. Current cars have problems
related to emissions and excessive land use. The emissions can be
eliminated by electric cars and the land use problem substantially
reduced by automated driving.

The corollary is that mass transit is dead. Personalized transit will
rule. No longer will a person have to walk to the bus stop and then wait
for a bus to take him or her to the train station where he or she will
wait for a train, only to then have to stand for a long time next to some
sweaty weirdo. Rather, the automated car will come to the customer
origin and take the customer to his or her desired destination, soup to
nuts. Once in the car, the customer will be able to flip out his or her
computer/communication thingie and BE at work while being transported
securely and in comfort to the office for that oh-so-important
face-to-face stuff.

Mass transit is dead! Long live personalized transit!

Ron
******

rmenich@...
07/10/02 01:14 PM
Please respond to spacesettlers

To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
cc:
Subject: Re: [spacesettlers] Re: Transportation within a habitiat

I couldn't agree more with Al Globus' point (2). Within a very few
number of years, people will WEAR powerful computers and communication
equipment everywhere they go. The revolution has already started with
cell phones and PDAs and pagers and so forth. These devices will, in the

future, allow us to "call for a car" wherever we are in the civilized
world. The car will come to us and obediently take us where we want to
go. We won't drive the car --- it will drive us.

Ron
******

Al Globus
07/10/02 12:37 PM
Please respond to spacesettlers

To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
cc:
Subject: Re: [spacesettlers] Re: Transportation within a
habitiat

...
Basically there are two choices outside of walking range: 1) a centrally
controlled mass transit system where an individual and/or committee
decides when and where the vehicles go, and 2) an individually
controlled system where each individual controls when and where the
vehicle they are using goes. The car implements the second and is very
popular with the users where available. Current cars have problems
related to emissions and excessive land use. The emissions can be
eliminated by electric cars and the land use problem substantially
reduced by automated driving.

--- In spacesettlers, rmenich@m... wrote:

> The corollary is that mass transit is dead. Personalized transit
> will rule. No longer will a person have to walk to the bus stop
> and then wait for a bus to take him or her to the train station
> where he or she will wait for a train, only to then have to stand
> for a long time next to some sweaty weirdo. Rather, the automated
> car will come to the customer origin and take the customer to his
> or her desired destination, soup to nuts. Once in the car, the
> customer will be able to flip out his or her computer/communication
> thingie and BE at work while being transported securely and in
> comfort to the office for that oh-so-important face-to-face stuff.
>
> Mass transit is dead! Long live personalized transit!
>
> Ron
> ******

Which is great... if you can afford it. Even w/o having to pay the
driver, a cab is likely to cost more than taking the bus. And as a
lot of people don't have that kind moolah to throw around, I'm afraid
that busses, trains, and sweaty weirdos will still be around for a
while. Unless...

If we're going so high-tech as to have automated driving, then why
just replace the *driver*? Why not replace the *car* with something
better? Why should we put up with gas-guzzling, ground-hogging, air-
stinking, not to mention dangerous cars? Can't the early 21st
Century come up with something better? First, let's consider the
celebrated automobile, star of stage and screen.

[A car takes me where I want to go, when I want to go.]
No it doesn't. It takes you where you want to go *if* where you want
to go is on a road. Even then, it doesn't really take 'where you
want to go,' it takes you to a parking lot right next to 'where you
want to go.' The 'when I want to go' is important.

While a car might have a theoretical or track performance of well
over 100 MPH, it can't go very fast in the real world (I don't care
if it's a Porche, if the traffic is thick and crawling at 3 MPH, your
Porche is crawling at 3 MPH).

Roads are ugly and take up too much space. As has been mentioned,
automated taxicabs would alleviate this somewhat. Maybe even cut
down the number of times your Porche gets bogged down in 3 MPH
traffic. Roads are still ugly.

Cars pollute, guzzle gas, and are dangerous to have around. Electric
cars will fix two of these problems. Automated driving will cut out
a lot of the danger (engineers don't let computers drink and drive).

So if cars are so awful, why are they so damned popular? Well, it
gets back to that 'where I want, when I want' business. As we've
seen cars don't take you exactly where you want to go, but they
likely take you closer to where you want to go than the bus would.

Then there's 'when I like.' If you want to drive around at 2:41 AM,
you can. The bus might not be running. Also, if you are five
minutes late getting into your car, you are five minutes late getting
to work, or that hot date, or whatever. If you are five minutes late
getting to the bus stop, you are likely going to be an hour late
getting to wherever.

Then there's that sweaty weirdo. Actually, he might be the nicest
guy in town, but personally, I'd be more comfortable riding in a
(relatively) small vehicle, either by myself or with a few people
that I choose to be with (talking over old times with my brother, or
that afore-mentioned hot date).

The link below would seem to be the answer. I've talked to the guy
in e-mail, and I personally think that he needs to make allowances
for the occasional use of larger vehicles. He's worried that the
cost would go up too much. Well, he's the engineer, so I guess he
knows how much things cost better than I do.

http://www.skytran.net/

Xenophile (who thinks putting this in Houston would boost that city's
chances of getting the 2012 Olympics [Dallas has already been taken
off the list])

panamabob Wrote:
> And why would this be? one central light source is one power consumer,
multiple
> light soures seems redunant...
> Fibre Optic lighting eliminates infra red (heat generation) and UV (fading of

> materials / dyes, breaks down some materials and tires the eyes)
> Fibre optics channeling in sunlight from outside provides balanced lights,
> again without IR and UV. No light bulbs, even longer lasting gas type rather
> than filament, is just one more thing to produce and store up somewhere

Of course there will be enough electricity to run the lights so we don't need
to worry about that aspect. Fibre optics may eliminate most infra red but using
more efficent lights would do the same as well. UV could be eliminated by
having a filter over the lights.

No need for filament when you're using flouresent lights. We would be able to
get what is needed to make the lights in space anyway and electricity is a more
convenient source then using fibre optics which generate heat even when the
light is off (that cover will cause some heat to be used up).

panamabob Wrote:
> Plasma screens are perhaps better than CRTs, but who would pass up 3d
instead?
> 3 dimensions of information rather than single flat view. Even now, folks
> enjoy 3d virtual googles. Because of the psycological limiting space of a
space
> station, regardless of size (other than that off another Earth :-) I would
> guess that people would look for any subtle ways of cheating limiting
> dimensions.

I didn't refer to plasma screens. I instead proposed Light Emitting Polymers.
These can get the same density as LCDs (as opposed to plasma screens which are
low density) with better colour contrast and less power usage as well as being
a lot easier to make. They're still being developed but by the time space
settlements are built they'll be the default display technology. LEP screens
can also be flexible.

As for holograms whilst they are possible we don't know how long it'll take to
actually get holographic displays cheap enough for everyones use.

panamabob Wrote:
> I think that slip was actually prophetic, a rock passing through the
atmosphere
> of the living area of humans should probably be called a meteor as well.

Probably right.

panamabob Wrote:
> I keep thinking of the snip " 50% of jobs 10 years from now have not been
> created yet" How will that deal with a project that is at best 20 years
away?

It means we don't know how we'll actually go about it. But we can get some
pretty good ideas and at least lay the groundwork.

Al Globus Wrote:
> A driverless car system uses far less asphalt. You don't need all that
parking
> space at every location people might want to leave cars.
Another advantage is that computer driven cars would be able to travel a lot
closer together then human driven cars due to the much faster reaction times of
the computers. This may allow what would have to be a two lane road each way
with human controlled cars to be a single lane road with computer controlled
cars. Thereby saving quite a bit of land. 100 km/h bumper to bumper would be
safe with computers driving the cars.

Al Globus Wrote:
> The batteries limit range, but with better electric storage technology driven

> by cell phone and laptops, this problem should be put to rest long before we
> build space colonies.

Vanadium Redox batteries are my choice for power. The charge is actually
stored in a liquid so to recharge it you just drain the old liquid out and pump
new fully charge liquid in. The old liquid can then be recharged at the
service station and given to someone else fully charged. In terms of charging
times if we assume we're designing a transportation system for an Island 3 the
farthest the car will have to go is less then 100 km per day thereby making
even the batteries of today good enough. Just make sure to do an overnight
charge everyday.

xenophile2002 Wrote:
> Which is great... if you can afford it. Even w/o having to pay the driver, a

> cab is likely to cost more than taking the bus.
There is the possibility that the colonists will decide to subsidise the system
with tax money to lower the per travel cost.

xenophile2002 Wrote:
> If we're going so high-tech as to have automated driving, then why just
replace
> the *driver*? Why not replace the *car* with something better? Why should
we
> put up with gas-guzzling, ground-hogging, air-stinking, not to mention
> dangerous cars?
We'll be using electric cars so they won't be air-stinking. As for safety
computer controlled cars could be made much safer since they won't be prone to
human error and will always be looking where they should be. The software
would have to be good enough to recognise a child on the road and take action
to avoid killing it but we should be able to do that.

xenophile2002 Wrote:
> The link below would seem to be the answer. I've talked to the guy in
e-mail,
> and I personally think that he needs to make allowances for the occasional
use
> of larger vehicles. He's worried that the cost would go up too much. Well,
> he's the engineer, so I guess he knows how much things cost better than I do.
>
> http://www.skytran.net/
An interesting link. In terms of larger vehicles I think they should be able
to operate something up to the size of a bus on it mainly for school usage
(since when they go on excusions they'll want to be able to easily supervise
the students). Anything larger then that and you just use the old roads left
over from the era of the car.

Mike Combs Wrote:
> Now that I think of it, jet-packs never caught on due to their extremely
> limited range. But in a habitat rotating for only 1/10th or 1/20th of a G,
> they'd have the range needed to become practical.

I have my doubts as to whether you'd want a habitat with that little gravity.
We don't know what the effects of such low gravity are on human health. I
don't think it'll be any good though.

--- In spacesettlers@y..., "victoriatangoman"
>
> > When there are billions of people in orbit it really wouldn't be
> hard to
> > foresee millions of cars.
>
> OK. I can't argue with you on the possibility of foreseeing such an
> outcome. But consider that we won't instantly go from our
lifestyles
> today here on earth, to a situation where there are billions of
> people in orbit wanting the lifestyle we have today.
>
> I believe it would be more likely that orbital societies will
> evolve. They'll start small, with everything within walking
> distance, and with no public transportation. As their size grows, I
> think the first step will be some form of mass transit. At this
> stage they'll have to import the equipment or develop domestic
> manufacturing for it. I'll argue that these orbital societies will
> evolve with a mindset unique to their situations and constraints.

I like the idea of building habitats that only house 30000 or so
people. Everything is within easy walking distance, and direct
democracy is possible (as opposed to the representative democracy in
the Western world today). Probably easier to build 33000000 of these
stations than to make Island 3s; take fifty years to build the first,
and then double the number every five years. It would take about 200
years to build enough "lebensraum" for a trillion people.

:) ed

It may be that it's more efficent to have a smaller number of Island III's
instead of a larger number of Stanford Tori.

In terms of direct democracy. You might be able to do it on a habitat scale,
but what's to say that the habitat will be the nation? More likely is that
most habitats will join together to form their own nations. There will
probably be quite a few of them. One's too large for efficent direct
democracy. Even 30 000 is large for direct democracy but could probably be
done with computers.

--- spider_boris wrote:

Interesting site this guy has. Reminds me of the transportation
system they have in the film "Minority Report."

Not sure about this guy's numbers, though. He's comparing apples to
oranges. He uses different acceleration rates to compare his idea to
cars/trains etc. He cites merging problems with cars, but makes no
mention of it in his proposal.

Now that I think about it, I kind of like the Minority Report
version better than his. :)

> The link below would seem to be the answer. I've talked to the
guy

--- victoriatangoman wrote:
> Not sure about this guy's numbers, though. He's comparing apples to
> oranges. He uses different acceleration rates to compare his idea to
> cars/trains etc. He cites merging problems with cars, but makes no
> mention of it in his proposal.

He used decleration rates not acceleration rates (although skytran would have
superior acceleration). Quite simply the speed at which they can come to a
stop is a very big factor in the safety of the method of transportation. As
for the merging problems with computer control they would be almost
non-existant. It's a lot easier to get a system like his proposal under
computer control then it is to get the roads under computer control.

>. He uses different acceleration rates to compare his idea to
> cars/trains etc.

But doesnt he hava a different acceleration rate? His is constant speed
where as people driven cars slow down / stop at intersections, accidents,
heavy traffic volume etc. killing the cosntant velocity which skew average
speed....

>He cites merging problems with cars, but makes no
> mention of it in his proposal.

Not sure what you mean here? Are you saying he doesnt claim tohave a
merging problem as well? My understanding was that his was computer
coordinated ( proximity sensor)

he needs to make allowances
> > for the occasional use of larger vehicles. He's worried that the
> > cost would go up too much.

He figures the support cost of the track...to support a 700 lbs vehicle
requires a lot less structure than a larger 10,000 lbs "bus" That extra
weight translates as more track strength.