Some of the problems of Habitats

--- In spacesettlers@egroups.com, "Dr. Omni" &
Mike Combs wrote:

Salutations all,

>Yes, I forgot about French - it was the international language,
specially in
>diplomacy, a long time ago. Also, it seems that German was a language
widely
>used in scientific papers around the beginning of the century, but
I'm not
>sure. I was assuming that economy is the only significant force
defining an
>international language (as in the case of English), but those
examples prove
>that I was wrong. Who knows, maybe population majority is also a
force
>driving towards international languages, and in the second half of
the next
>century everyone will be speaking Chinese. ;-)

You are correct about German, it was the scientific language for a
long time. Latin for scholars, French for diplomats, German for
science and English for commerce; a little Euro-centric aren't we.
But today English is stomping over everybody else, you need it for
most international dealings, if you are a pilot and fly
internationally then it is compulsory. All things considered though
you are right to say that the most important factor is economic, money
makes the world go round. There may be more Chinese or Indians but in
the era of instant electronic communications English has a very long
head start.

>> Australia is such a mix of people these days that it is very common
to
>> walk down a street and see ****sighs*** or hear people talking in
almost any
Sigh, . of course I meant to type SIGNS, see what happens when your
fingers get ahead of your brain.

>Unlike Australia, which is a place of relatively new colonization,
Brazil is
>what could be called a "finished" example of multiculturalism in many
>aspects. Our colonization begun in the 16th century, and for 500
years there
>has been cultural and genetic mix of Portuguese, African and Indian
(or
>"Native Brazilian") people here; also, in the 19th century, there was
a new
>wave of European immigration, mostly Italian and German; and,
finally, in
>the early 20th century, a Japanese wave (oddly, Brazil has the
biggest
>population of people with Japanese ancestry outside Japan). As a
result, we
>are a very... peculiar people. Theoretically, we speak Portuguese,
but it is
>*so* different from the Portuguese spoken in Portugal - due to the
inclusion
>of a lot of African phonemes, and also Indian words, plus
simplification of
>other words - that some linguists say that it should be considered
another
>language. (In fact, I can barely understand what people from Portugal
say.)
>Racial mix, in every conceivable variety, is the rule - it is kind of
>difficult to find someone who looks purely white or purely black or
purely
>Indian; I work for an American company and, in one of my business
trips to
>the US, some of my American colleagues were just wondering *why*
Brazilians
>look so different from each other ;-). Also, since we are a very big
country
>of old colonization, there are expressive cultural differences -
accents,
>food, etc - from region to region. Now, as the rest of the world, we
are
>suffering a new wave of multiculturalism, brought by the
globalization - our
>cable TV is filled with American and European programs, there is the
>Internet, and economy is becoming a swarm of transnational companies.
>
>So, if multiculturalism will be the rule for habitats, then I would
also
>welcome that rule. However, I'm not sure if that will be the case...
In the
>early decades of space colonization, probably there will be few
places to go
>and those few places will be crowded with people from every part of
Earth.
>As time progresses and the construction of new habitats accelerates,
on the
>other hand, maybe some habitats will be massively colonized by people
with
>the same ethnic/cultural background. And, since each habitat will be
much
>like an island, kind of isolated from the others, the tendency for
such
>uniformities would be to remain.

I really can't comment on Brazil, having never been there but I'm not
sure you can compare the way Australia and Brazil were colonised.
When I talk about multiculturalism here, I am really only talking
about the last 50 years. Australia had something called the "White
Australia Policy", a not particularly nice set-up designed to keep out
anybody who didn't "fit", with "fit" a bit of a variable but in
general it was to keep the population, white European. Now in the
late 1940's on, the government worried that we didn't have enough
people (we are just a little smaller than Brazil but only have 19
million people but a huge amount of the country is not really suited
to a large population, that is it's desert). This lead to a policy of
population increase, one of the (many) ways used was by immigration
and despite heavily subsidised travel not enough people from the
"traditional" sources were willing to come here. We started to have
people from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean countries, now we had
always had people from all over the world immigrate to here but now
they coming larger numbers and this meant they were more visible. The
next 20-30 years saw a huge number of people from Malta, Italy, Greece
and that part of the world arrive. Our second largest city is call
Melbourne and it has the largest Greek population outside of Greece.
I remember as child some of the bitter comments made at the time about
the "New Australians" a term somewhat like "African American" (without
being specific about race). that is it could have been used as
derogatory or not depending on who used it and how it was used. I
always thought that this kind of "polite" reference was the worst kind
of insult, showing that you really didn't consider the other person as
the equal to you. I am happy that when my daughter first heard the
term she had no idea what it meant. Fast forward from 1946 to today
and the immigrant population of then is so integrated that some of the
less polite terms used to describe Mediterranean immigrants then are
now being used as the names for TV comedy shows, stage plays and
movies with nobody (well very, very few) being insulted. My point
(sorry about the round about way I get to it) is we were forced by a
belief (mistaken) that to survive as a nation we needed more people
and the ones we wanted we couldn't get, so we took what was thought at
the time to be "second best" and in fact turned out to be the best.
At first any habitat is going to be Western, that is Western
European/North American, that is to say mostly white and dominated by
the USA. If others do follow they may (in fact most likely will) run
into the problem Australia had, the inability to get the kind of
immigrant that they want (take a look at this
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/wannabe.htm ) and once you start to
mix people you move towards what life is like here or at lest I hope
so (of course I am biased but I really feel that Australia has one of
the best, if not the best lifestyle in the world but don't take my
word for it, the UN has a survey listing countries by satisfaction
with lifestyle and we always make the top 3-4, usually behind Canada
and Denmark). As for isolation, well Australia was, is considered
isolated but I sit here talking (well typing) to you, on the far side
of the world, physical is becoming less important every day.

>> http://www.sciam.com/1999/0299issue/0299beardsley.html and
>> http://www.sciam.com/1999/0299issue/0299beardsleybox4.html
>>
>
>Thanks for the links, Darren! The second one shed a lot of light in
the
>lightcraft concept. So far, I had find very little information on the
>subject using search engines and stuff...
>
>As for the first article, it is... awe inspiring. With so many
companies
>competing for cheaper access to space, it is hard to believe that
none of
>them will find a way. However, for now we can say that the schedules
>presented by the majority of those companies were way too optimistic:
it
>seems that the article is from February 1999, and none of the
experimental
>flights scheduled for 1999 and 2000 seems to have actually happened.

Sighso it seems, sometimes I wonder if I will ever see the world do
what I think they must do, I was eight (okay just about nine) when
Armstrong put the first footprint on extraterrestrial soil and I would
like to be able to take my son and show them to him, in person.

>Hmmmmm... I think that speculation envisioning the asteroid belt as a
bunch
>of cities-states, each one based in its own asteroid and politically
>independent from the other ones, is more likely to happen. Even if
such
>fusion rockets that can cross the Inner Solar System in a week are
actually
>invented, each asteroid will still be an "island" physically
insulated from
>the others. Looking at corresponding earthling analogies - for
example, the
>Caribbean and Polynesian islands - we see a lot of small, different
nations,
>even though you can go from one island to the other in a matter of
hours.
>
>Also, unlike Earth's nations, asteroid cities will be isolated from
each
>other also under the telecommunication perspective. Due to the
lightspeed
>barrier, a phone call (or a session of internet surfing) from an
asteroid to
>other one a few gigameters way would be impracticable. Therefore,
under any
>point of view, asteroids would be much more isolated from each other
than
>islands on Earth are from each other, and so they would develop as
different
>nations, I think.

Maybe, maybe not. Forget about the type of transport you have to move
about and how long it takes to get from A to B, I think that there
will be a real mix of systems depending on cost and how important time
is. Again I'll fall back to my homeland. Consider Australia is the
only nation to have a continent all to itself, this gives us the
advantages of an island but with the problems of continental distance
that islands don't have, add in the fact that the controlling
authority was weeks and months away, it could take 6 months for a
message to go from Sydney to London and then get a reply by which time
the situation has changed, a lot. Back at the time of federation (100
yrs ago, when all the states joined to become an independent nation
albeit with a British monarch as head of state), the situation wasn't
all that different from what you postulate for an astroid belt
civilisation. They didn't have phones or any kind of instant
communication in each house or workplace so even with a telegram there
was a matter of hours/days between the sending of a message and it
getting into the hands of who it was meant for, with the same kind of
time to reply. It could take days or weeks to go from state to state
(we have 6 with the distance between east and west coast like a trip
right across South America, the wide part. In some sense the states
are like independent nations and back at federation they were to all
intents independent nations, still today the federal government is
forced to used external treaty obligations and it's control of the
revenue base to impose it's will on the states but for all of that we
have a much stronger central government than they have in the USA,
without the need for a legislative whip). But we still made it as a
single nation, part of that was a common heritage and the fact that we
were so interdependent economically. Any habitat is going to be a
very expensive project and those who pay the bill are going to want a
return on their investments, it is possible that groups of habitats
belonging to different nations/companies will form separate groupings
but the idea of every habitat going it's own way, while fine in theory
is a way for individuals to locked out of trade. If you want to see
an example of what happens when a single nation decides that it can be
self-sufficient and isolated take a look at North Korea, granted it
had other problems. Europe is a mass of nation states but they have
formed themselves into first a trade bloc and then monetary union and
are moving to further integration. The small island nations around
the Pacific may be independent but they are also poor and there is a
move towards umbrella organisations to allow them to negotiate as a
group, a trend world wide (this is being offset in Oceania by
tribal/ethnic tensions but this is more about who gets the seat at the
table than if you want any seat at all). At first any habitat is
going to belong to those who paid the bills and the country the
project is based in, this leads to other problems. Take a look at the
many UN treaties governing this kind of thing. Basically they stop a
nation from claiming any celestial body but tell me if I was to land
on an astroid and start to work changing it into a habitat, hollow it
out shape the outside to make it spin without being off centre and
build a biosphere inside, is it still a natural celestial body and can
a nation now claim it? If it isn't a natural celestial body how much
work did I have to do before it changed status? It all comes down to
property rights and money, the habitats will be as independent as they
can afford to be and the investors allow them to be. Even if the
somebody paid for a habitat and then said forget about paying us back
it would still be tied by bonds of economy. In this day of instant
money transfer global economics I think you might have a habitat that
is culturally independent but not economically.

>Indeed, I still don't know why so far none of the space stations
actually
>built (skylab, Mir, ISS) have artificial gravity. If the problem is
>interference with micro-G experiments, that could be easily avoided
by
>building a zero-g chamber with no rotation. Astronauts and cosmonauts
could
>perfectly dwell in the gravity sectors of the station and work in the
zero-g
>sectors. Without the problems associated with zero-g, the permanence
of
>astronauts in orbit could be much longer...

No the problem is one of physics and biology, with the small radius
of what we can put into orbit today if you had something rotating fast
enough to give you a full 1G any sudden turn could give you a stroke
or a blinding headache if you're lucky, not to mention rotation speeds
in excess of 3-5rpm make just about everybody motion sick, check out
http://www.spacefuture.com &
http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/artificial_gravity_and_the_architec
ture_of_orbital_habitats.shtml.
Also a separate non-rotating section adds to the cost to a significant
degree.

Welcome to Mike Combs, I'll answer both of your replies because they
are pretty near the same.

>> Now you have to get a population and then you have to house, feed,
>> clothe, water, entertain, supply air and a general environment for
>> them. What happens to the excess heat or do you need to supply
heat?

MC>If we're talking about the solar-powered habitats of O'Neill, we'll
MC>need to dump excess heat. Fans circulating air through metal
MC>radiators should be sufficient.

Yes, I knew that and the bigger the habitat the more heat to dump,
it's a function of the square/cube law, surface area increases by the
square but volume by the cube and radiation is not the best way to
dump heat but it's really all a habitat would have. The trick is to
increase the surface area of the radiator without increasing the cost
or finding some way to export the heat to elsewhere, an example would
be if you worked with ice and used your excess heat to bring it from
deep space temperature to normal room temperature. Long ago I read of
a novel suggestion that has always intrigued me but I don't know how
practical it would be. The idea was to have a mass of fine sand or
dust, this is used to collect heat from inside the habitat and then
pumped to the outside where it is dumped into space to spread into a
large volume. Each particle would radiate its heat as it travelled
towards a collection point, where it is caught and put back into the
system. While it sounds workable I think you would have a number of
problems, first you would have a certain amount of loss no matter how
well you aimed or how large the collection point, next the particles
would be radiating heat but also picking it up as radiation from other
particles then photon pressure from every light source would push the
particles around. You could also use things like large water masses
to act as thermal dumps for short time storage.

>> Where does the sewerage go and what happens to it? What do you
>> produce and who buys it? How do you get it to your customers?

LC>I think that the question of heating is just a matter of
engineering, though
LC>in a domain much larger than usual. As for the sewerage, however,
this is
LC>part of a much more complex problem: how to maintain a
self-sustained closed
LC>ecosystem in the habitat.
LC>
LC>But perhaps that problem is not *that* complex at all. First of
all, unless
LC>you're planning to make an interstellar travel or something like
that, no
LC>habitat would be a really closed ecosystem: there would be constant
input
LC>and output of raw materials and living beings, and you would not
really need
LC>a perfect recycling of everything. As for some specific and very
nasty
LC>problems, like sewerage, perhaps the most practical (and cheaper,
and
LC>quicker, and cleaner) solution would not be try to recycle the
thing by
LC>feeding several strata of different species of plants or bacteria
or
LC>something; since you're in an environment with an endless and
abundant
LC>supply of energy from the Sun, you could simply vaporize sewer
decomposing
LC>it in its molecular/atomic components, and then using the ashes and
gases
LC>so obtained directly in your agricultural sectors - after all,
plants need
LC>mineral salts and gases, and that is what you would get by
vaporizing sewer.
LC>(Of course part of the sewer could be cultivated as an organic
fertilizer,
LC>but I think that vaporization of most of the sewer would supply a
quicker
LC>solution for other needs, like water recycling.)

MC>To the CELSS of course. We just try not to think about it too
much.
MC>:)
MC>
MC>Another alternative was proposed by Marshall Savage. He
recommended
MC>use of a super-critical combustion chamber to combust sewerage down
to
MC>simple compounds, which would then go into the CELSS. It's just a
MC>choice between using microorganisms to do the job, or using the
MC>machine Savage recommends.

Great minds .:-) There is a company in England that has used the
plant and micro-organisim option, call, I think, "Living Water" or
"Living Machine", ah, a quick look on the net gives me an American
company with a unit in England,
http://www.livingmachines.com/splash.htm &
http://www.livingmachines.com/pdfs/earthcen.pdf . Might be the same
one, might not the program I saw was a few years ago. I also heard of
a project here in Australia where the ouput of a treatment plant was
used to grow small fresh water shrimp which were made into meal and
fed to fish in an aqua-culture farm and then onto peoples plates. The
Sydney water board also have some pilot programs going where the
output of the water treatment plants are made into a kind of
fertiliser used to grow trees and grass. Burning everything hot
enough to turn it all into elements is making sure they don't mix back
into things you don't want but if you put a charge on them they might
be able to separate, don't really know, I'll need to think about it.

LC>Now, the economy problem: the first economical utility that I see
for
LC>habitats, like that of basically any new colony, is supplying raw
materials.
LC>In the case of space habitats, those "materials" could also be
energy: since
LC>fusion reactors are always things for "50 years from now" and oil
price is
LC>always skyrocketing, I think that solar power space stations can be
an
LC>option for an energy-hungry world - provided that the cost of
getting to LEO
LC>drops significantly, of course. Also, asteroid mining seems to be
another
LC>relevant activity: it is true that there are yet many mineral
resources on
LC>Earth, but thanks to our political divisions, there are nations
(Japan,
LC>Europe, etc) that are incredibly poor in many natural resources,
including
LC>metals, and easy space travel could open a door for terminating
their
LC>dependency on other nation's resources.
LC>
LC>Last, but not least, there is the potential for space tourism, at
least for
LC>habitats in LEO (and perhaps around the Moon or in the lunar
surface)...

MC>I get lots of arguments from Mars advocates, but I still say SPS is
a
MC>plausible export for orbital settlements, and Earth is the market
for
MC>it. O'Neill was intelligent and practical enough to know that his
MC>vision of orbital habitats would not be realized until he could
MC>identify a market better served from space than from Earth, and I
MC>think he correctly identified it. When I ask what market is better
MC>served from Mars than anywhere else, I just get told that exports
MC>aren't really all that important, and money isn't everything.
MC>
MC>The thing I like about SPS is that the customer being served is
Earth.
MC>I can't seem to convince Mars advocates that the first customer for
MC>our products has to be Earth people. They don't seem to understand
MC>that saying the justification for settling Mars is to serve the
MC>markets that the Martians will require is a circular argument.
MC>
MC>I think O'Neill was correct in saying that the only products better
MC>produced in space than on Earth are orbital assets, but orbital
assets
MC>can still be sold to customers on Earth. The beauty of SPS is that
MC>power can be beamed down. I don't have as much confidence in the
idea
MC>that anything might be mined in space and then sent down to the
Earth,
MC>although I suppose some platinum group metals might be an outside
MC>possibility.

SPS, yes but there are other possibilities but a lot depends on
politics and technology. The problem breaks down to a few simple
factors. First raw materials are easy to get if you are already in
orbit, that already in orbit is the hard part, the first step is the
hard one but once there the rest is not that difficult. The problem
with supplying raw materials to Earth is that one of the first
supplied will be energy, the SPS and then with cheap power what is to
stop them from doing exactly what both of you just mentioned as a
solution to waste and recycling, just burn the lot and extract the
elemental output and mix as needed. The same applies to just about
any technology you care to name, some bright spark will work out how
to do it cheaper without the need to boost to orbit. Of course you
then use that knowledge to make your product cheaper and so it goes
on. Bottom line, if a habitat can't make a profit, it won't happen.
Power works because you have more to work with in orbit and it can't
be beaten on the ground or rather I don't see how it can be. Tourism
is always a possibility, again the main resource being used is
position but mining metal from asteroids, while a positive from the
point of view of the Earth-side environment, has the downside that you
are basically asking somebody to stand under a falling rock, all you
need is a simple mistake or hostile intent and instead of a
city/town/landing zone you have a large/hot hole in the ground. Ask
any military type you want if they would rather be holding the high
ground or not. When dropping heavy rock on people they really must
trust you, this usually means they and you are on the same
side/country/company, you get the idea. As for terminating a
countries dependence on outside sources, well maybe, but if you make
everybody interdependent then (providing it isn't too lopsided) you
might just increase that element of trust that would allow you to drop
large heavy rocks on their heads, without them thinking you were
trying to do more then sell
copper/iron/nickel/gold/silver/platinum/iridium etc. Damn, didn't
mean to go on for so long, well I post this tomorrow, which would be
today for you.wouldn't it?

Darren Brown