Space Settlement

On Mar 16, 2007, at 04:44 UTC, tom.bielecki wrote:

> I have had long talks with my biology teacher, my physics teacher, and
> my chemistry teacher, and I AM LOOKING FOR YOUR INPUT, ON HOW YOU
> THINK LIFE WILL BE LIKE, IN SPACE, IN THE NEXT 200-400 YEARS

That's a very long time from now, given the accelerating pace of
technological change. Go check out the book "The Singularity is Near"
by Ray Kurzweil. He makes very well-supported arguments that the
"singularity" (when nonbiological intelligence outstrips biological,
and proceeds in what would appear to us to be a sudden jump in
capability far beyond anything we've had before) will happen within the
next 50 years or so. Even if he's off by a factor of 2 or 4, that will
happen before your 200-400 year time-frame.

So, by that time, almost all of humanity will be non-biological, and so
considerations your teachers are likely to find sensible (such as
providing food, dealing with radiation, and the need for pesky things
like an atmosphere) will be non-issues except for dedicated nature
preserves.

However, for the sake of a school project, I guess it's reasonable to
ignore that and pretend that the future will be pretty much like the
present except for a wee bit more engineering prowess. That's wrong,
of course, but it'll get you a good grade. :)

> My settlement so far is a torus, with a major radius of 2 or 3 KM, and
> a minor radius of 1.5 KM. Do you think that this spinning colony
> should have a "ceiling" to hold in the atmosphere?

Well yes, of course it should, if you're assuming biological humans.
Otherwise said humans will object when all the atmosphere vents to
space (walls 1.5 km high will NOT contain it) and they asphyxiate.

> if it does, then it blocks all UV light, needed by living organisms

What? Living organisms don't need UV light; indeed, UV light generally
kills them (or for big multicellular organisms like us, gives us skin
cancer, at least to the extent our cellular repair machinery can't keep
up).

Plants do need visible light to grow, of course, but just because you
have a ceiling doesn't mean it can't be transparent. You *have*
already read some of O'Neill's work, or NASA's Space Settlement Design
Study, right?

> if it doesn't have a ceiling, then
> particles might enter the atmosphere, we would have natural UV, and,
> hey, it would look cool.

Plus everybody dies from the vacuum (unless you assume post-biological
inhabitants).

> I am planning on the settlement being a technological cocoon for the
> settlers (starting: 500,000 ?). This would allow the citizens to live
> IN technology, rather than WITH technology. Nerve centers on the body
> will be able to create more senses in the body... possibly even a
> telecommunications link between individuals, to "hear what they hear"
> "know what they know" "feel what they feel."

You need to decide what your assumptions are. I've a master's degree
in Neuroscience, and I'm a bit skeptical about extending and connecting
biological brains; it would certainly require Nanotechnology (with a
capital N) as well as advanced AI. But once we have those, the
Singularity would indeed be upon us, and pretty soon everybody will be
uploaded anyway and dealing with messy wetware (i.e. biological brains)
will no longer be common.

But do you really want to go into all this in a space settlement design
project?

> I am looking at creating somewhat Post-human citizen,...This will
> truly be a utopian society. No government. No disease. No money. No
> businesses. No services.

And no grades? :) Seriously, unless your teachers are very unusual,
you're going to tank on this project if you put all that stuff in, and
you can *certainly* forget about winning the NASA competition. Just
design a nice futuristic settlement for plain old 20th-century
biological humans; that's what they want to see. And realistically,
trying to design for a post-singularity world is a bit pointless
anyway. As the saying goes, the future is not only stranger than we
imagine, it's stranger than we *can* imagine.

Good luck,
- Joe

P.S. http://www.ibiblio.org/jstrout/uploading/ may be of interest.
Joe Strout -- joe@...