Re: Solar powered lasers in space

On Sep 24, 12:36 pm, Ian Parker <ianpark...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 23 Sep, 20:05, Willie.Moo...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:





New York is where all the action is taking place.

Precisely my point.

That is basically
why people are there. In point of fact you could get rid of New York
wiithout a fantastic amount of space engineering.

You will always have places like New York. Given human sympathies we
may always have a New York! even if its an historic recreation
between Wall Street and Park Avenue! lol.

This can also be done by developing terrestrial technology.

When you can fly ballistically at 1 gee to any point on Earth in 20
minutes or less (thrusting outward during the middle of the flight to
maintain altitude against centripetal force) - the Earth has in fact
become a global village. There is a strong psychological connection
between the time it takes to get somewhere and what you consider your
hometown. Wherever you can go in 40 minutes or less, you consider
your neighborhood. If it takes longer than 40 minutes, then it
becomes a bother. Longer than 2 hours and its a different place
entirely. So in the days of horse drawn carriages it took 4 hours to
go 10 miles. I live in Columbus Ohio. Within 5 miles of 'downtown'
which used to be Columbus proper, there is Clintonville, and 5 miles
beyond that Worthington. This was the day when average speed of
transit in a horse drawn carriage was 2.5 miles per hour. Today
average speed of transit by velocipede, automotive preambulator,
motorized carriage (which locals call simply 'car') - is 50 mph. So,
the same 5 miles that took 2 hours before - can be traversed in 6
minutes. The separate towns and villages surrounding Columbus, have
merged into a great metropolis, and these villages have become post
office boxes known as sub-urban areas - or 'suburbs' to the larger
city. In fact in two hour you can span over 100 miles - allowing the
City of Columbus to spread across Franklin county forming a single
integrated community. At automotive speeds the Cities of Cleveland
and Cincinatti, Wheeling and Indianapolis, are the nearby towns
today. In an age with high speed subsonic personal VTOL bizjets
capable of 500 mph - the Cities of New York, Chicago, St Louis, and so
forth, will absorb these towns.. and in an era of 50,000 mph VTOL
cruisers - just discussed - the entire Earth will psychologically
become one city - and the orbiting colonies and factories will be the
suburbs, and the moon will be a small nearby town...

Actually ballistic flight may not be the best solution.

Why not? Postulating that industrial humanity gets on a path that
cuts the cost of energy by half every 5 to 7 years - as was that case
from 1850 through 1970 - then ballistic transport is a very efficient
solution. Orbital velocity is 7 km/sec. Escape velocity is 11 km/sec
- twice orbital velocity - 14 km/sec - would produce 1 gee outward
force to maintain altitude - these represent energies of

E = 1/2 m V^2 = 24.5 MJ per kg - orbital - $0.74/kg
49.0 MJ per kg - escape - $1.48/kg
98.0 MJ per kg - 2x orbital - $2.96/kg

The costs are calculated on the basis that a gallon of gasoline costs
$3.60 and contains 120 MJ. So to transport 500 kg ballistically would
cost $370, $740, and $1,480 per trip - respectively.

Assuming energy costs were on a downward cost trajectory, being cut in
half every 5 years - (13% reduction every year compounded), far less
agressive than say the advances in the consumer electronics industry,
then in 10, 20 and 30 years we'd have per trip costs of;

10 years $92.50 $185.00 $370.00
20 years $23.12 $46.25 $92.50
30 years $5.78 $11.56 $23.12
40 years $1.44 $2.89 $5.78

We can see that in 50 years, the cost of travelling from one side of
the world to the other, would not only be accomplished in 45 to 22
minutes, but would also cost the same as it now costs to drive across
town in 20 to 45 minutes.


The solution
may well be to have evacuated tunnels and electromagnetic
acceleration.

The solution to what? I'm having trouble tracking your thought
process.

Robert Goddard suggested that in 1910. The tunnels, if the Chunnel is
representative, would be very capital intensive and of lmited
utility. Getting on and off the tunnel, and then driving to and from
the tunnel entrances become huge bottlenecks. This cannot compare to
an automated aerial taxi service that transports you anywhere on Earth
in minutes in response to a cell phone call.

Distance travelled at 1 gee - acceleration to halfway point - 1 gee
deceleration to destination from halfway point;

1 mile 26 seconds 285 mph top speed
2 mile 36 seconds 395 mph top speed
5 mile 58 seconds 635 mph top speed
10 mile 81 seconds 900 mph top speed
20 mile 2 minutes 1,275 mph top speed
50 mile 3 minutes 2,015 mph top speed
100 mile 4 minutes 2,850 mph top speed
200 mile 6 minutes 4,030 mph top speed
500 mile 10 minutes 6,590 mph top speed

One small
point. You are now inplicitly postulating VN machines. If all the work
is done by robots the colony is VN. I personally beieve O'Neill is
only credible in a Von Neumann context.

At some point we will have VN machines. Probably sooner rather than
later. The early work of Johnny von Neumann was so successful and
suggestive of immediate progress, I wonder if this isn't being
supressed along with some of his other stuff related to secret codes.

I don't think so. There are a great many conspiracies but this is not
one of them.

How do you know?

I do not think there is any conspiracy in fundamental
science/mathematics.

Not conspiracy - policy.

http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/rdd-7.html

Check out section B-1 - Mathematics is included dude. And this is
just for nuclear physics. I'm sure there are similar classifications
in place for methods involving the production and decryption of codes
and other stuff as well.

Here is what was declassified! haha.. Which means it WAS classified
at one point.

B. MATHEMATICS
Methods of applied mathematics and computation if illustrated on
declassified subjects. (46-1) Examples:

Shock hydrodynamics. (46-1)
Integration of partial differential equations. (46-1)
General diffusion theory. (46-1)
Theoretical methods for determining equations of state. (46-1)
Chemical kinetics including application to ordinary explosives.
(46-1)
Theoretical methods for calculating opacities. (46-1)
General theory of blast. (46-1)
Methods of applied mathematics if illustrated on declassified
subjects. (47-1)
Pure and applied mathematics including computational methods, provided
it does not reveal information classified for other reasons. (48-1)

I think that the VN machine has not been built
because in the time of Von Neumann computers just weren't powerful
enough. A similar situation held with regard to language.

You don't need sophistcated computers. VonNeuman had a shoebox filled
with hand carved wood pieces that when shaken self-assembled. He also
had a tiny dried clay pieces that when you put the concave and convex
(female/male coupling) together the void was identical to the
parents. So, you could take a *** of clay and make other identical
pieces out of them.

As I've said, this was reported in the press back in the 40s - and
NOTHING has been done to build on these rather simple approaches. And
the pieces and shoebox have disappeared, and computer records don't go
that far back, and its only the memories of old farts like me that
recall it at all.


http://groups.google.co.uk/group/sci.physics.research/browse_frm/thre...

When we are considering assembling flat packs we are in the situation
of "We can build it if we want to and if we have the imagination".

Correct. VonNeuman built examples of what he was talking about - and
then nothing.

As
far as codes are concerned we already know a lot.

Look at a vonNeuman machine. It reads and writes a string of 1s and
0s. - advances, reverses.. that's it. It doesn't take much from
there.

We know about the
RSA code the beauty of which is that you can establish it without ever
having to transmit anything in plain text. We know too that with any
generating function we have a code, but we need RSA to set our
generating function up.

RSA codes are based on the ASSUMPTION that there is no way to factor
numbers quickly. This assumption has never been proved. So, that's
its achilles heel. Sorting numbers is a computationally difficult
task. But when numbers are each concieved as the length of an
uncooked spaghetti noodle, all you've got to do to sort them is hold
them in your hand, drop them onto a table top, and they're
automatically sorted in an instant.

You have a certain conception based on the popularizations of these
ideas, and that puts your mind into a certain mode. You don't really
understand these things deeply. You appreciate the potential,
certainly, but you don't appreciate the details and just how easily
these things could be built with the right people working on it.



How long should we wait. Go now for energy - quite right. VN is at the
end of the road, it has to be.

But we can do a lot in space in the interim. Beam energy from the sun
to provide Earth's energy and provide advanced transportation
technology (light-wing VTOL super-ballistic transport in every
garage) Survey all the small bodies in the solar system. Use the
laser capacity near the sun to capture the richest of these to bring
into MEO. Use the same factories and launchers to put remotely
controlled robots that are shot into space to operate by remote
control within MEO - hire the 1.6 billion unemployed in the world, and
pay them with output from the factory,sell the excess, and keep the
profit.

I don't think it has to be ballistic.


What is this problem you have with the world 'ballistic'?

You understnad what I mean by ballistic don't you?

It means it follows a ballistic trjectory.

Jesus. you were talking elsewhere about travel between the planets.
Well, that's lots faster and lots more energetic than mere ballistic
transport from point to point on Earth.

It takes about 84 minutes for a minimum energy object to orbit the
Earth. It takes no more than half that time for a sub-orbital payload
to follow a ballistic trajectory to the anti-podes (halfway around the
Earth)

http://www.cs.utah.edu/~zachary/isp/applets/Cannon/Cannon.html

So, since we were talking freely about people flying constant gee
spaceships from planet to planet - there is no trouble whatever
imagining people flying suborbital spaceships ballistically from point
to point ON a planet. And the first planet we'll do that with - is
planet Earth.

Like I said, 42 minutes gets you on the other side of the Earth. With
a constant gee spaceship like I was discussing, you can accelerate to
twice orbital velocity, and boost outward to maintain altitude -
trajectory - and arrive to the antipodes in 21 minutes - and anywhere
else in less time!!



Ditto on terrestrial possibilities.

But that's not needed! There are 3.4 billion men and 3.4 billion
women within 1/7 light second of one another. Its a total waste of
energy to build sexual analogues of them when you can go meet them in
person! Better to spend money to make food production and
distribution more efficient.

Somewhere there is a compromise that suits the majority of
people.

This is only by necessity of our limited technology involving
primitive forms of communication, transportation and production.

I am not so sure. The question I am asking is why do business
executives keep travelling to meetings which are completely
unecessary, even with present day technology.

You can meet people in New York easier than you can meet them
elsewhere. OK perhaps not New York, but you do need a settlement.

Wait a minute... please appreciate what we're talking about here. On
the one hand we're talking about interstellar homesteading. The
technology and energy needed to achieve that. Everyone owns their own
space ranch with laser light wings attached - tapping the energy of
the stars themselves to boost through interstellar space at large
fractions of the speed of light.

Now we're talking about communities. Collections of folks. Having
access to this type of technology and this level of energy per
person.

Imagine a time when all the stars have hovering above them man made
fog of laser powersats that beam energy in response to signal lasers
that each starship carries. The ship is booste at 1 gee across the
cosmos until its halfway to its destination. Then, it signals its
destinatoin - and is slowed at 1 gee until it arrives. And the
spaceship is the size of an ONeil colony. I computed that stars the
size of the sun could support 20 million or so of these colonies
arriving and departing every second!!! In a year the entire human
race could circulate out of the solar system.

In the context of this massive amount of energy entire planets will
seem as small psychologically, as a cozy neighborhood. We wouldn't
want to mess up a planet with big tunnels and huge collections of
buildings. Why do we need them? Imagine millions or perhaps billions
of colonies in leisurely orbit around Earth and Mars and so forth.
Like the rings of Saturn. And small high gee spacecraft dart out of
each habitat and fly in minutes or even seconds to another. In 20
minutes a person could dart from wherever they were in Earth orbit to
wherever else they wanted to be in the ring, or on the surface. This
would BE a city larger than New York ever could be. Phone calls and
telepresence allow people to communicate instantly. Constant gee
spaceships allow them to hop from one side of the planet to the other
in minutes. The entire planet has become one vast city.

Because of our primitive forms of communication. I mean, Bill Deming
demonstrated the importance of gathering quality data during the 1940s
and integrated into production systems that made weapons and so forth
- to solve quality problems with weapons. The Japanese adopted these
techniques across their industry - and the resulting improvements in
quality, volume, and cost allowed them to make very sophisticated
products (automobiles, consumer electronics) very competitively with
established manufacturers, by the 1960s they were making inroads in
the US and Europe, and around the world, by the 1980s, US and other
manufacturers began adopting some of the techniques, it wasn't until
2000 that most manufacturers were ISO 9000 compliant - and this is but
ONE detail where science has impacted manufacturing. There a whole
host of findings that are gathering dust, vonNeumann didn't just
postulate and do work on SR machines, he built prototypes! and its
been a dead letter.

Not completely (see above) Von Neumann lived in the era of valves and
it was hard to execute his devices.

Yet he built a machine with a shoebox and a penknife that self-
assembled, and he built a small set of dried clay devices that could
automatically mold daughter devices that also could mold daughter
devices... to illustrate the ease with which is concepts could be
implemented. Have you even read the source material? The orirginal
writings on this subject?? Or have you just read the popularizations
of it?

The thing I feel now

But what is the real solid basis of your feeling? You can see that
machines that can make copies of themselves can end the Malthusian
delimma - but is that because you've been told that or because you've
figured it out on your own? And now what? What do you really thing
based on what you really and truly know? How much of what you're
saying here is just repeatition of what you've already read from
someone who was a journalist or popularizer?



is that we
have computers of fantastic power, in comparison. Somehow though we
have lost a certain amount of vision.

Because no one does the hard work to figure stuff out on their own.
To really think about a topic and thoroughly understand it. You
switch from starships and talk like someone who lived in a ONeill
sized starship couldn't possibly afford a ballistic transport!
haha.. You have no idea what's going on, and so you have no idea how
the pieces might go together.





Norbert Weiner, Ken Arrow, Wassily Leonteiff,
have huge bodies of work - just to name a few - with Buckminster
Fuller acting as cheerleader. But all these folks worked in the
1950s. With the exception of Eric Drexler, I haven't seen any follow
up on any of this. And these fols suggest small steps to improve the
efficiency and quality and cost of our productive systems across the
board using cybernetics and advanced math.. haha.. but folks haven't
adopted it. Or have been slow to adopt it. I will say retailers have
adopted retail automation - this is something I had a small part in.
But this is just the smallest drop in a rather large bucket that if we
tapped into it, we could transform life on Earth today without VN
machines - by understanding adopting and adding to the bodies of work
that lie dormant in our collective abilities.

We are basically designed for a hunter gatherer existence. Tis is
perfectly true. Hunter/gatherer bands were (probably) round about
50-100. With that number of people objectives are fairly well agreed.

Correct. One interesting possibility in the near future, if everyone
has access to ballistic transport and the internet, folks can organize
along lines that are most productive and complementary - rather than
geographically.

You don't need ballistic transport - all you need is a decent system
of telepresence.

What the hell do you have against ballistic transport? ITS THE WORD
ISN;T IT? You don't know what the word really means so you're afraid
of it- you have it associated in your head with 'hes gone ballistic'
and 'destruction by ballistic bombardment' haha.. you lunatic. Jesus
learn what the hell you're saying before you say it.

This is achievable in the very near term.

We already have ballistic missiles. And we already have telephones,
we had vidphones 40 years ago - and have teleconference,today and
we're working on telerobotics - so yeah. But in the context of what
we're talking - ballistic transport could be 3 to 5 years away. It
would change everything.
..
These are all arguments which will be raised by the skeptics. I don't
think there will be any skepticism about energy. I don't think
colonization will be a stated goal for a long time.

Well you disagree with what Werner vonBraun said in The New Horizons
study done for the US in secret following World War 2. VonBraun said
we could have begun colonization of the moon in 1948 and urged the US
to take the leadership position. The work was classified for a number
of years, and his advice ignored until Sputnik.

Fact is, we could start to colonize the inner planets and the moon and
cislunar space today if we had the will to do it.

Yes I do. Werner v Braun - like v Neumann in some respects had a
vision that could not be realized at the time.

Yes it could. What do you think Apollo was all about? Project
Horizon 1959 (not to be confused with New Horizons study 1948),
Project Lunex 1961 - he actually built rockets as far back as the
1930s. Tsiolkovski had a vision that couldn't be built in his time in
the 1890s. vonNeuman built a lot of *** - as I pointed out.
VonNeuman and vonBraun BOTH were hands on engineers that built
stuff.


You cannot consider
space colonies without a drastic reduction in cost.

Duh. that's what we're talking about. Reducing the cost of energy and
the cost of materials on orbit. This is related. Beam energy from
near the sun to Earth for industrial use. Beam energy across the
solar system to change the orbits of rich asteroids to bring them to
Earth orbit. Then launch telerobotic systems into Earth orbit or
begin working those rich asteroids into useful stuff. And deorbit
that stuff directly to consumers using GPS and satellite
communications.

This reduction of
cost is so many orders of magnitude below current costs

Nonsense. You talk as if these costs couldn't be reduced. I've
outlined a specific program to produce 300 TW of laser energy at a
cost of $20 billion - that would bring 8 asteroids each 1 km in
diameter into polar orbit around Earth per year - and power space
factories and flights from orbit to surface of finished goods.

that a lot a
technology has to be developed first.

Like what? You don't know what's going on and you don't know enough
to understand what i've said, so you are say uh uh its complicated and
will take a long time. phhtt. Anything takes a long time if you don't
know what the hell you're doing.

We can have a power station as
an objective, we can have a VN maschine. Colonies, they will be
objectives when the costs are right.

So you ARE familiar with Gerard O'Neill and the L5 society right? You
are familiar with the NASA studies done back in the 70s about space
colonies. These give the basics. Now, reduce the cost of stuff on
orbit by a factor of a million by bringing rich asteroids into Earth
orbit and process them with telerobotic systems. This avoids a moon
base up front and a large manned presence in space up front - but
gives you immediate economic benefits and huge cost reductions.

If you can get onto a downward spiral of costs then things will indeed
happen quickly.

Yes. This is achieved by choosing a valid metric of measurement -
continually reviewing it - and then investing in improving it. We
cannot expect progress in any endeavour until all of these steps are
carried out. Once they are we can expect exponential improvements in
cost in very short times.

But colonies will still not be an objective.


When you can buy 10 sq km of any environment you want free of any
restrictions - that is mobile - for less cost than a 1/4 ha plot in a
suburb - and when travel to orbit is less costly than travel across
town - people will naturally buy homesteads in space.

The highest price homes are $100 million. Millions of homes are
priced between $10 million and $100 million. There are 9.5 million
millionaires in the world. An ONeill space colony masses about
500,000 tons. So, let's say a starting price of $50 million per
colony is needed to attract a critical mass of buyers. By the way, a
Boeing Business Jet costs over $65 million - and there are dozens of
those. but this is $100 per ton. $0.10 per kg. This is the price
point we have to reach. Today it costs $10,000 per kg - or
1/100,000th the cost.

Now, I have proposed a system that builds 100 kg systems that get
launched into space by rail gun, and fly to hover over the solar
surface. There they operate in conjunction with one another to create
a 20 km diameter 300 TW beam of laser energy. This beam can bring
trillions of tons of material into Earth orbit. The same rail gun
array that launched the laser sats can also launch advanced versions
of ASIMO - powered by laser energy from the sun - along with toolkits
to allow the remotely controlled robots to process the materials into
useful products.

Coal miners routinely process tens of thousands of tons per day. With
an average cost per worker of $100,000 per year, and a million tons
per year - we're ALREADY at $0.10 per kg.

A reusable system that makes 10,000 flights - and has 1/2% replacement
cost as arecurring cost per flight - a system that is achievable
nearterm - then we have a system that has reduced to cost of GETTING
into orbit to $100 per kg. This is cheap enough for the high net
worth individuals to routinely travel back and forth to their space
homes.

What I'm saying we could do space colonies today with the right
approach.


Consider that between 1948 and 1968 we went from the

...


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