User talk:Prometheuspan~enwikibooks/archive1


 * Ecology Sciences
 * Life Sciences
 * ENVIRONMENTAL
 * Medical Sciences
 * Biochemistry
 * Zoology
 * Agriculture
 * Ergonomics and Environmental Psychology
 * Geology Sciences
 * Meteorology Sciences


 * PHYSICAL SCIENCES
 * Basic Physics
 * Thermodynamics
 * Systems Theory
 * CHEMISTRY
 * Engineering
 * Mechanics
 * Advanced Mathematics
 * Advanced Physics
 * Space
 * Alternative Sciences
 * Mathematics
 * Basic Math
 * Advanced Math
 * Algebra
 * Advanced Algebra
 * Geometry
 * Calculus
 * Statistics
 * Simulation Math
 * Computer Math


 * Computer Science
 * Hardware
 * Software
 * Programming Languages
 * Pure Theory
 * Computer languages
 * Game Theory
 * Computer Games
 * Computer History
 * Computer User Sociology + Psychology


 * Engineering
 * Mechanics
 * Architecture
 * Construction Chemistry
 * Drafting + Communications
 * AERONAUTICS
 * BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING
 * CHEMICAL ENGINEERING
 * CIVIL ENGINEERING
 * Geology, Minerology, etc
 * Alternative Engineering

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Language+tree&btnG=Google+Search http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_families_and_languages
 * Languages
 * Linguistics
 * Syntax, Grammar, and Memes
 * Languages, General, Linguistics
 * Niger-Congo (1514 languages)
 * Austronesian (1268 languages)
 * Trans-New Guinea (564 languages) (validity disputed)
 * Indo-European (449 languages)
 * Sino-Tibetan (403 languages)
 * Afro-Asiatic (375 languages)
 * Nilo-Saharan (204 languages)
 * Pama-Nyungan (178 languages)
 * Oto-Manguean (174 languages) (number disputed; Lyle Campbell *includes only 27)
 * Austro-Asiatic (169 languages)
 * Sepik-Ramu (100 languages) (validity disputed)
 * Tai-Kadai (76 languages)
 * Tupi (76 languages)
 * Dravidian (73 languages)
 * Mayan (69 languages)


 * Humanities
 * Anthropology
 * Sociology
 * History
 * Philosophy
 * Metaphysics
 * Morality + Ethics
 * Law + Government
 * Psychology + Psychonautics
 * Religion
 * Political Sciences
 * Educational Sciences
 *  How To"s
 * Study Guides


 * Arts
 * Graphic Arts
 * Video + Computer Arts
 * Sculpture and Recreational Engineering
 * Music
 * Dance
 * Theater Artes
 * Literature + Poetry
 * Non-computer Games + Game Theory
 *  Humor
 * Geography + Travel
 * Sports + Recreations 
 * Hobbies and Special Interests


 * Annotated Texts
 * Miscellaneous

list of bookshelves
this list is cut and pasted from the list of bookshelves. It is obviously in Alphabetical order. Taxonomic order, or ontological order seems a better paradigm to operate from. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/All_bookshelves -
 * Annotated texts: annotated texts on various subjects
 * Art: Visual, dance, music
 * Business: Accounting, employment, finance, real estate.
 * Computer and video games
 * Computer science
 * Computer software: Software guides, operating system guides
 * Domain-specific languages: mark-up, meta, query and other languages used in computing
 * Education
 * Engineering: Civil, mechanical, electrical, electronic and chemical engineerings
 * Games: Board games, card games, tabletop role-playing
 * Health Sciences: Medical sciences, Forensic Medicine, Optometry, Nutrition, Physiotherapy, Public health sciences.
 * How-tos
 * Humanities: History, philosophy, religion
 * Information technology: Programming languages, certification
 * Languages
 * Mathematics
 * Miscellaneous
 * Natural science: Life science, chemistry, medicine, physical science, environmental
 * Programming languages: all sorts of progamming languages
 * Social science: Anthropology, economics, political science, sociology
 * Study guides: Annotated texts and guides for tests

another good metamap needs more details
hmmm, it won't seem to let me copy over from the main page i got it from. --- This is the root category for all Wikibooks categories.

bg:Категория:Начална категория da:Kategori:Kategorier de:Kategorie:!Hauptkategorie es:Categoría:Principal ja:Category:主要カテゴリ nl:Categorie:Alles pl:Kategoria:Główna pt:Categoria:Principal simple:Category:Main Page th:Category:มูลฐาน uk:Категорія:Головна

Interesting list of categories
One of the things that both the Dewey Decimal system and even the Library of Congress catalog does very poorly at is cataloging Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (or more speicifc... Computer Engineering) materials. Neither Software Engineering nor Computer Engineering are even acknowledged as legitimate engineering disclipines by either classification system. Oh, you can get to them, and they do have classification codes, but it is very obscure. Computer Science is considered a sub-disclipline of Mathmatics for the LOC classification and is a sub-disclipline of "General knowledge" for the Dewey Decimal system... right next to Encyclopedias in fact. Prometheuspan 02:20, 25 February 2006 (UTC) I think ontology should concern itself more with groups of things as they actually exist and need to be dealt with, and less with assorted numbering and classification systems. When I look at that dmoz.org space, the first thing i think of is the same thing i always think when i see that kind of list, (similar ones which are used by google and yahoo and msn, etc.) Its obviously a list generated by a person who wanted large umbrellas and no political fallout. The list is cognicentrically biased to put religion, for instance, as a subheading under "society." And so forth. This isn't a reasonable organization schema, and i doubt that the people who generated it were even slightly interested in ontology as much as they were in just making the list quickly and getting it done with. A realistic list of that many topics should be significantly longer, and ordered with many more subdetails. Sociology and Religion are not meant to be squeezed together into one category, just as many of those categories are hard squeezes. I hate the dewey decimal system. It was generated so long ago that its usefulness is entirely archaic. If we are going to number things, lets at least make 30 slots instead of ten, so that we spread things out a little more realistically. Think of it this way; we want people to be able to make simple and predictable causitive leaps of understanding, to guess easilly which topic heading is the one the subtopic they are looking for is under. This is a user interface issue, even more than an ontological one, and the problem with these systems is that they aren't user friendly, they are librarian friendly and sysop friendly respectively. Prometheuspan 02:20, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

In addition to the current disorganized state of Wikibooks content, we also could look at the Open Directory Project, where quite a bit of thought has gone into ontological organization of more modern content. Their purpose is to catalog web pages, and they do have some more unique pressures such as trying to deal with commercial content that is not so much of a big deal here on Wikibooks either. The number of weblinks for that project is larger than the number of Wikipedia articles, although I think Wikipedia is catching up (hardly a fair comparison, however, and the ODP has been running quite a bit longer). I think this is a good example, however, of what a mature group of links with typical internet users is going to look like, especially for the top categories.

Still, I think your approach is going to be better than what we currently are doing. Prometheuspan 02:20, 25 February 2006 (UTC) It is an approach that with your help could get a lot better. Its a very simple ontological approach. Make the categories that simply do exist, put them in some kind of order relative to each other, and then make subcategories as the need arises.

The main point i'd like to make is that the list was generated by simply viewing the content you have on the main page allready, and generating categories that umbrella that content. All of these systems put the cart before the horse. The first question here is "How easilly can a user judge where to look for or insert content?" The currrent page is a mess at least in part because those divisions are too vague and thus unclear. Don't go looking around the net or at other systems. Look at your content and organize it. Prometheuspan 02:20, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

A request for input
Since you are interested in ontological issues as well, I would like to get your opinion on how I've tried to work with the   template that is going to be a tool to help us out with the classification of the various Wikibooks. The idea here is that we will not be having to update each page whenever a new Wikibooks is added, but instead take advantage of the catagory system (significantly underused here on Wikibooks) to help with the classification work instead. This template is intended to be added to the "main page" of the Wikibook, perhaps the title page. Prometheuspan 02:20, 25 February 2006 (UTC) I think that the pages i have spotted with categories lists are a good feature, but that their actual use shows you that they aren't very user friendly, at least not yet. A meta is needed to organize assorted subcategories, and while it is nice to have a list with alphabetical order, the list most people will use is the one in ontological order. Rather than having a large tree of main categories and subcategories on different pages, what you need is a category/ sub category on a single page, linked to from the main page. Keep the old pages, and update them, but realize that most people won't use them, its too much like a labyrinth. Prometheuspan 02:20, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

For an example of how this might be used, see Programming:Serial Data Communications (a Wikibook where I'm a principle author) to see how an individual Wikibook might be classified. Discussion about this was done on the WB:CCO talk page, but I've tried to put it into actual practice, which revealed a few flaws in its execution. I need to work a little bit more on the template as well, to make some parts "optional" for inclusion, but this is a good place to start. I'd like to eventually put one of these templates on every Wikibook, and perhaps even expand the practice to include some of the content on Wikisource or even Gutenberg.org. That is more ambitious, but the Wikibooks content is certainly a higher priority. Prometheuspan 02:20, 25 February 2006 (UTC) I think a wikibook on reference materials is a great idea. Lets get to that after we solve our own problems. Prometheuspan 02:20, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

This is also to help "arrange" books to be "close" to related books, and using classification schemes that many people are already familiar with (notably the LOC and Dewey classification codes). More can easily be added to this template, and we need to work on what constitutes a "related work" as well. Prometheuspan 02:20, 25 February 2006 (UTC) A "related" work covers similar ontological turf. say, 20 axioms worth. Prometheuspan 02:20, 25 February 2006 (UTC) In addition to all of this, I would like some input on LOC Classification. I've been trying to add the search heirarchy for the Library of Congress catalog onto Wikibooks, and create a bunch of categories that can be used with the catalog template mentioned above. Dispite all of the problems with this classification system, it is one that is commonly used and familar to people from outside of Wikibooks. --Rob Horning 16:51, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Prometheuspan 02:20, 25 February 2006 (UTC) I think having multiple classifications systems in use is a great way to go. People who are deweyists ought to be able to link to the dewey meta, at their leisure. However, the Dewey system is an archaic system, and doesn't serve your primary needs. What you need in the primary list, and on the main page, is an ontological list which simply takes the obvious categories and then derivates the obvious subcategories, not of fictional, hypothetical, or paradigmal content, but of the content that you have. (or, the content you would like to have.)

Another main point here is that if you do a good job on the front end, nobody will be pestering you for where to put their book, it will be self evident. That is the thing we should shoot for, a system in which the location of specific content is self evident, within a single page +1 click.

Lastly, there are obvious holes in content on Wikibooks, and this is how I think that should be handled. For each of the Categories, (listed say in bold and red,) 4 or 5 examples of assumed content could be listed to fill out that line (in black italics, for instance.) Actual book entries would then go on the lines underneath. (in link purple/blue) In this way you can generate a very lucid map of content. Prometheuspan 02:20, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Some personal thoughts and replies
First off, from reading your main user page, you say you were raised LDS and born in Provo? Do you still consider yourself to be LDS? --- Prometheuspan 22:26, 28 February 2006 (UTC) well, yes and no, mostly no. I'm Eclectic, with a heavy emphasis on integrating >everything<. In as much as I have done that and come full circle, I think its an honest point to make that the Essenes, if compared to modern Christian movements, would most closely resemble Mormonism. Since that is a Scholarly observation, I don't know if it qualifies. If the Church could fullfill its mission and use modern Scholarship to fully re-instate Essene Theology, I might come back on board. As it is, they put Beef in their vegetable soup despite the book of mormons admonishment to eat meat only in times of winter or famine. This compares favorably with the fact that the Essenes were vegetarian. As an example, it illustrates both the fact that Smith was on to something, and the fact that the Modern Church lost sight of exactly what that was.

I currently live in Logan, Utah and am currently the Ward Webmaster (strange calling at that). I was also born in Provo, but I moved around a bit as well, including about 4 years (about 30 years ago) in Santa Barbara, or more exact I lived in Carpenteria but my dad attended Brooks Institute and graduated with a B.S. in Photography from that school. I loved the Botanical Gardens and the Santa Barbara Mission, and loved to go and play in the ocean as well in Santa Barbara. I didn't know how good it was at the time, and would move back if I ever had a chance or a reasonable professional opprotunity. It was a far better experience than where my parents moved from Santa Barbara, which was Inglewood, CA. Talk about a change of environment. - Prometheuspan 22:26, 28 February 2006 (UTC) interesting coincidences. If that was inglewood colorado, it would be even more. Myself, I have moved sufficiently past mormonism that i wouldn't be able to survive emotionally in Utah. This area is paradise, but i see myself moving North to find that demographic of even more "liberal" folks.

On to Wikibooks business....

Go ahead and simply start the Wikibook project as you are suggesting.

yeah! kewl!

Something that I think you might want to check out first is this Wikibook:

Colonising Mars

They have a mailing list that I am also involved with that has touched some very interesting points, including many of the space colonization issues that you have brought up. I hope this gives you some framework to consider, or something to compare and contrast with what ideas that you have. This book, Colonising Mars, is currently on the Miscellaneous bookshelf, but that may be misplaced or certainly could be part of a much larger collection of books on that topic. You may want to dig up the archives of the mailing list as well for some other ideas to include as well. --Rob Horning 19:50, 28 February 2006 (UTC) -- I will look that up. As a side note, I had envisioned linking to as many other wikibooks as were relevant, and to as many wikipedia articles as possible. Prometheuspan 22:26, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

Bot
Unfortunately, I haven't heard of anything like this. --Derbeth talk 23:40, 16 March 2006 (UTC) - Prometheuspan 00:33, 17 March 2006 (UTC)huh. You'd think they would have like an RSF or some such thing set up to link a new wiki to its parent networks like that. I have asked at the bot request wikipedia zone. Is there somebody else or someplace else to go look? Prometheuspan 00:33, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Brain dump of material for the "thinkstarship" project
Here's a short brain-dump of items that may be useful for your "thinkstarship" project. - wow! Thank You! --

I don't have a WikiBooks account, and don't plan to get one in the near future. If you need to contact me, it's best to do so on my user talk page at Wikipedia.


 * You're going to need a lot of delta-v to colonize the outer solar system, or to colonize anywhere quickly.

True, and excellent point. This observation organizes as a point over to the "Map" page, and the Physics page.

ThinkStarship has several main key points here allready covered. We propose to use a combination of many different tools available to us, and are trying to do it in an ecologically and economically sound way also. Due to economics, I think most of the plans on the table currrently would be moderate thrust systems. I'm not looking to win races as much as get there safely in a reasonable amount of time. That in mind, I'm proposing to use Air augmented rockets till out of atmosphere, chemical rockets to orbit, nuclear powered rockets to break orbit, space ramrockets for primary acceleration and deceleration, and a very studious use of the interplanetary transit network.

---

-- Nuclear powered rockets are the strongest thrust we have. There are a lot of people who have issues with their use, and this is why I have been very careful to insure that they would never fire while in range of our ecosystem. Magnetic space breathing microwave ignition ramrockets will give a pretty low delta V, but provide a lot of thrust over a long and steady period as compared to the Nuclear powered rockets. -
 * You're going to need at least moderate thrust to colonize anywhere quickly.


 * Combining these gives a fairly arbitrary requirement of a delta-v of 100-300 km/sec and an acceleration of at least 0.01 m/s2. This will let you get just about anywhere in a year or less (Neptune or Pluto in about 2 years).
 * Relaxing this window to 10-20 years gives you a delta-v of 10-30 km/sec and a thrust of 0.001 m/s2, and allows gravity assists. Simpler engines, but much, much more complicated environment systems, so probably a no-go.

One primary operational axiom here for me is that we are going for the closest targets first and colonizing in a slow motion wave using the planetary gravity assists. Colonizing the entire Solar System in the next 50 years sounds preposterous to some people, until you realize we could do that t minus 15 years to first launch date, and then a slow drift actually into the solar system for the next 35 years. If some enterprising entreprenuers want to plant their flag on some rock before ThinkStarShip gets there, it won't be that hard cuz most of what we will have done will be pretty public record. ThinkStarship isn't trying to get to Mars in under 3 Years, Jupiter probably about 5 or maybe even 10, because the rings are going to be a big project. Saturn another 5 after that, things start to speed up as the designs start calling for larger and more expensive engines. But by then we are using the asteroid mining endeavor for spare mass, so building monstrous sized things isn't a big deal to us. --

--- Thats good information for our physics and Propulsion page. I'm not sure that i could go for any thrust device with a nuclear radioactive thrust. Nuclear power for a magnetic system seems like a more realistic alternative for several reasons, asides from calming the nerves of environmentalists. I'm not an Algebra guy, but what I understand here is that the specific delta V you end up with is going to be a product of different burns of different engines. As long as you have a very high delta V burn for a sufficient duration, a very low delta v burn for a much longer time will afford the kind of speed that is useful. I think using many different types of thrust systems, whilst being mindful of what eaches strengths and weaknesses are, is the key here.
 * Drive options that we know how to build at present are iffy for these constraints:
 * A pebble-bed fission reactor that you run hydrogen through as reaction mass gives you a high-thrust drive with an exhaust velocity in the range of 4-5 km/sec when run as hot as you possibly can. This and a 90% fuel fraction give you a delta-v of around 10 km/sec with a single-stage fully reusable craft. Thrust is relatively high (potentially enough for soft-landings on the moon or even Mars, if most of the rest of the mass is engine). Drawback: delta-v is bad.
 * A fission-electric engine has as much delta-v as you want it to, but is very low-thrust, due to the power to weight ratio of the reactor. Pulling numbers straight out of my tail gives a thrust of 0.0001 N/kg for 100 km/sec delta-v. You can probably reach ten times this, but a hundred times this will be very difficult. Delta-v and thrust are inversely proportional for this kind of drive.
 * I get about 0.001 N/kg for 100 km/sec delta-v with solar-electric in Earth's orbit. This number is on a bit firmer ground than the fission-electric one. Farther out, it's far less useful. It's marginal for a Mars trip, and to do that at all you'd have to reduce delta-v.
 * The "electric" end of an electric drive would probably be a Hall-effect thruster, as that avoids electrode erosion problems, and is high enough thrust that it's used for stationkeping for satellites, and is well-understood.

--  The X1 Starship, which is the ship doing all of the long trips in my currernt hypothetical fleet, will be unto itself an experiment in a balanced ecosystem. It is also designed to assume that the fully funtional ecosystem completely fails, and to provide air, water, and food for as long as it would take to get back to Earth, or an emergency assist payload. Believe me, I was hesitant at first to think of having a payload requirement of a whole grocery store, a large swimming pool, and a busload of oxygen, but you are right, they are requirements for the safety of the adventure. -
 * The habitat for the trip will contain dried food and medicine as things that _must_ be stored as disposables. Air and water are easily recycled if you're willing to spend a lot of power to do it, but for short trips (1-2 years) it might not be worth the added mass. The mass of air required will be at most about three times the dry weight of the food. The mass of water required is on the order of a couple of kg per person per day, tops.
 * The colony itself will need several heavy pieces of equipment:
 * Power plant. Either solar or fission-based (you can use ship drive reactors for this, but they'd have to be pretty beefy). Solar is only really practical in the inner solar system, without exotic construction techniques.

<> I keep finding myself in the position of explaining how useless Solar is in the outer Solar system. Thanks for the back up. I am pretty much relying here upon Nuclear power for most of my energy needs. However, I am a SOFT Nuclear Proponent. Have You heard of it? Are you familiar with its Political issues? I do think that Solar Powered sattelites in earth orbit is a great way to generate power for Earth. -- -- <> The ThinkStarship answer to this is two fold; First, there would be a main device of this sort in the asteroid capture payload. Second, there would be Robots whose task this would be.
 * Universal smelter. This would be a combination chemical and electrochemical widget that breaks down rock/dirt into oxygen and metals/metalloids, and then separates out desired metals present in few-percent quantities (aluminum, iron, and titanium, mostly). This can be an open-cycle system if you have a source of water to get hydrogen from. A closed-cycle system would do its best to recycle hydrogen, but would still need to be topped up periodically.

-- Right, and again, the plan here is to have a payload of robots and droids of both macro and nanite sizes specific to the tasks of mining Asteroids, repairing ships, and fabricating space stations. -- -- First, The ThinkStarship plan calls for having balanced ecosystems to provide most of the air needs. This is an air cycle issue, and there is to be an entire set of pages devoted to solving that problem. Secondly, redundantly, 3 to 5 years worth of extra air will be stored for each astronaut. And lastly, yes, there are a variety of ways to get air out of the environment, and this will be one of the things that will be covered as droid tasks. --
 * Really good machine shop. This must be capable of fabricating spare parts for everything in the machine shop.
 * Airmaker. This is slightly easier to make if it can work in an open-loop cycle. You can get oxygen from the smelter, if on a waterless world, but getting it from water is easier. In a pinch, an air recycler that's periodically topped up will work.
 * Watermaker. You'll need to recycle water on a hydrogen-poor world like the moon or an asteroid. You'd do this by distilling what you can out of waste, and then burning the residue in a hydrogen atmosphere and electrolyzing any resulting water. The hydrogen would then be reclaimed (unless you're on a reducing world like Titan). On Mars, you can condense water from the air in trace amounts, or mine it from the ice caps. On any given world, you'll have either lots of oxygen or lots of hydrogen for the taking, given power. The other will have to be conserved if you're not on a water world.

< > Distillation is certainly one techniqe that we will have available to use, however, the biocycle itself will attempt to cycle water naturally. I am curious to know and don't what "Reducing world like Titan" means?

-- --  Yes, it will be very large, about the same size space for biocycle as for the rest of the cabins spaces. In other words, the ecosystem doubles or triples the necessary size of the cabin space. Thats just for vehicles tho. Colonies will be another matter, and a smelter is again one thing we will have, but extrusion at complicated levels is more complicated than just a smelter, and we will need a lot of other devices, including assorted forms of heating and cooling centrifuges, tubing, chambers, etc, etc. Mad scientist gear etc. - - <> We are close to knowing how, there are several key AI heuristics and only a few real robotics problems left to solve. Humans will probably be increasingly useful to design things and increasingly irrelevant to build or repair them. -- --- <> I'm assuming that the robotics colonization format for large moon or planet will be that the a full cities infrastructure will be put mostly in place before the colonists arrive. Self sufficiency is going to be very important here. It is going to be very expensive to import something and increasingly less expensive to build something on site once you have a robot army working. Short of this, the list of things for cabin payload for use in transit is indeed immense.
 * Greenhouse. This will be Bloody Huge, but can mostly be built from on-site materials. Fertilizer will have to come from nonmetals extracted from your smelter, though.
 * Humans are an integral part of this system. We don't know how to build a completely automated manufacturing plant, and even if we did, humans would likely be much cheaper.
 * Some items, like medicines and integrated circuit chips, will have to be imported until the colony grows big enough to have enough of an industrial base to build a hundred-million-dollar facility to produce that type of thing. This also includes things like diamond-impregnated tool bits, really good scientific equipment, and so forth. You're going to need lots and lots of spares for this type of supplies.

--- <> Agreed, Robots build other most useful Robots to triple redundancy levels for any system that involves a survival failsafe.
 * Everything else can be bootstrapped with a sufficiently kickass machine shop. The very first things made will be spare equipment for the machine shop (ideally, several machine shops). Second things made will be extra smelters and airmakers and watermakers, so that you can shut these down for regular maintenance or have one fail on you without losing the colony.

- <> That library is now being generated by Wikipedia in infancy stage. ThinkStarships "Education" page should and will reflect the need to generate a long term, every topic library, with a textbook format useful to educating any child to educated astronaut status. That is in a sense what we are doing here; generating the knowledge base that will be carried to the Stars.
 * Light things that you're going to have will be a kickass library, and a kickass entertainment system, both on the ship and colony-side. You need to be able to train people up to be experts in a diverse variety of subjects, and you're going to need to keep people happy for years on end. This wasn't possible during the Apollo era. It's easily possible now.

The one thing you don't want me to do is design the recreation department. I know we need one, but I'm a Geek, not a Jock. I do design really very nice hot tubs tho. - *You'll want a high-bandwidth communications link to Earth to keep your library and video collection up to date, as well as sending back status and survey and scientific information. Big dishes are cheap, if you're already hauling a hundred or more tonnes of stuff for a colony. -- Again, this is another argument in favor of slow but thoughrough exploration. That way, you are creating a trail of link-ups and substations behind you as you go. However, I would limit off ship communications intentionally because i think that each Ship and colony should to some extent accept its isolation, and focus on itself.

Asides, contigous evolution isn't that desirable. The best thing about many different groups leaving earth is the capacity for each to evolve into its own unique culture. Those differences will be enhanced if people are motivated to create their own entertainments and so forth inside of the closed system.

I think a rational limit here is about a maximum of 1 hour a day time dealing with information from external to the colony per Astronaut. --

I guestimate the bare minimum colony base being 100 tonnes and 10 people. Add another 100 tonnes of supplies, and you can keep them alive for a few years, covering travel and colony-establishment. Add another hundred tonnes of engine and fuel tank, and 3000 tonnes of reaction mass, and you have yourself a ship that might be buildable. It would cost about $100 billion to launch at current market prices. Minimum manned survey craft is about a tenth this for all numbers. Unmanned survey craft a hundredth this or less. - I don't think 10 people is large enough crew from a sociology perspective. As I have Aspergers Syndrome, I am particularly mindful of the need to counter Pack psychology with a sufficiently large size population. My minimum crew is 12, and I wouldn't ever send out such crews in groups of less than 3 ships. A better option is about 40. Trust me, the social and psychological stability factor more than makes it worth it. My tonnage estimates for ships was in the hundreds ranges. For Colonies I think we are talking more thousands. However, many of those tons could probably be mined; Again, my idea here is to send a group of ships to say mars, each with a crew of 12, have them colonize diemos and phobos first, turn those into serious machine shops, and then execute a remote controlled landing of droid armies from Phobos and Diemos to then land on Mars and build the Colony.The Colonists arrive late in the assembly schedule. Fuel costs are low for Nuclear powered Ramrockets. --

If you're building somewhere close by, like the moon, you can reduce costs in the short term by sending regular supply craft from Earth, but you'll still need bootstrapping equipment for the colony. Say about $20 billion to launch at current market prices. With a moonbase, colony craft cost goes down to about $30 billion, as you can supply your reaction mass from the moon for far less expense than from Earth.

<> Again, Self sufficiency is the goal we probably won't attain, which is why the colonization wave should move slowly. We should find materials to use and successfully mine them in order to learn how to do it better and as we go. Cuithne, and other Near Earth Asteroids are targets which are even more important than the Moon. The Moon is mostly useful in my mind as the new center of our artificial captured asteroid system. ThinkStarship pretty much wants the nearest objects first in the order of closeness and usefullness. In some ways, we might even think of it as brooming up the Solar system of anything that might get perturbed and take a close swipe too close to the earth in the next billion years. Mars in comparison is a distant and long term project compared to cruithne. --- --  My y2 and y3 designs call for shuttle craft with both chemical and nuclear powered rocket thrust.
 * You'll want chemical rocket shuttles to use as landing craft, ferries, and so forth. If delta-v is in the 2-5 km/sec range, you can do this quite easily with single-stage reusable methane+LOX craft.

Both methane and LOX are very easy to make in-situ if you have carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen available, and will in fact show up at various stages in your airmaker and smelter, so you don't need extra equipment to produce them. The components used in these craft are well-understood and are for the most part already in use. These can probably even be built and maintained with colony equipment, though building them on Earth and transporting them (without fuel) is probably cheaper.

< > Thanks again. I'll have to let this sit in my mind for a bit and then start parting some of it out to the actual document. --

That about covers it. For further conversation, contact me at Wikipedia. --Christopher Thomas 04:34, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

First response to brain dump commentary
I'll keep this relatively short, as we could end up discussing this all day without accomplishing much, as we seem to have different views on a lot of things: - So far it seems like we mostly share pretty similar perspective on most things. Also, as opposed to some other people i have been chatting with, say, for instance, in Yahoogroups, you have been very civil and very forthcoming with useful information. I'm not an expert in everything, so some useful input from a person like yourself is greatly appreciated.

Where we seem to differ the most is the specifics of implementation in the plan I'm proposing. Unlike most people, I'm not so attached to any part of it that I wouldn't let go of some parts of it if somebody were to show good cause why a a particular aspect is a bad idea, or, some better way to go about doing things. All I claim to have done with the general plan is to have strung in a general way together the basics of what is possible in some sort of realistic but fast paced timeline. My expectation is that the plans details will evolve and grow as experts weigh in on things that I'm just an amatuer at. I'd rather be wrong and corrected than right in my own mind and wrong in any other reality. On the other hand, I'm more lucid by an order of magnitude than any of the guys over at YahooGroups. --

- Thanks, I am a non-mathemetician. -
 * You seem to be uncertain about what thrust and delta-v mean. Thrust is the force your engines generate at any given instant. Divide it by craft mass to get acceleration. Delta-v is the total change in velocity that your craft can attain by spending all of its fuel (doesn't matter how quickly or slowly it does this). The delta-v to get between various parts of the solar system is well-known. It depends on what type of course you use (minimum-energy elliptical transfer, or a complicated path that uses slingshot maneuvers, or a very complicated path that attempts to use both liberation points _and_ gravity assists, which seems to be the type you're looking at).

--- remember, I'm going slowly out in an expansion wave. I think you are right if i start from earth with the intention of getting immediately next stop pluto. In either case, I visualize not as fast as the first figure and not as slow usually as the second. Thanks for the sense of spectrum and range. -
 * Figure 100-300 km/sec delta-v to get anywhere in single-digit years, 10-30 km/sec to get anywhere in double-digit years using slingshot assists, and forget about the "interplanetary superhighway". That takes far too long to get manned craft anywhere, and doesn't save you that much delta-v.

-
 * You're putting way, way too much faith in automated robots. I'm a computer engineer. We have no clue how to build a completely automated factory. We hope we'll know how to do it in 50 years, but I'm pretty skeptical. The NASA proposal for an automated moonbase is mostly useful because you can use it to figure out what you'd have to do with humans instead of robots running the place. Don't be fooled into thinking it's something we can actually build without several very fundamental advances in computer science. I think it was Werner von Braun who said, "a human is the best computer we can put into a spacecraft, and the only one that can be mass-produced by unskilled labour". Humans are expensive to maintain, but they pay off big time in flexibility. If you're doing anything complicated, it'll be done by humans.

My Expertise is in psychology. I am well aware that the heuristics problems are huge. However, I think that the best solutions for this are things that I'd like to explore here. You are correct, we don't have the Heuristics down yet, and often, I brush this aside. I think i have more faith in a near term set of solutions than you do, but I am aware of the serious obstacles.

-  Again, I am thinking much more near term than that. The nearest rocks first. Inner solar system. I wouldn't "enforce" anything in any case, I'd suggest, strongly, and take issue with people if they became unproductive or apparently fixated. ---
 * Any outer solar system colony will already be culturally isolated by the time delay for messages. You won't need to enforce bandwidth caps on people.
 * The minimum size for a self-sustaining colony is about 100 people at the time of establishment. This is due to the 50/500 rule for population genetic diversity (you need at least 50 people to avoid inbreeding in the short term, and at least 500 for mutations to feed new genes into the gene pool as fast as they're lost by random selection). I used 10 people as the minimum number of people needed to _build_ the colony, and to keep it running until you can ferry more colonists over.

 For genetics purposes, I think we are definitely coming up with about the same numbers. My concern with 10 people is that this is right at or under the Threshold level for pack psychology to take hold. I want to keep tribal psychology going. Its sort of an esoteric Sociology problem. -
 * You need far more greenhouse space than colonist space. Look at the ratio of farmland to city land on Earth to see why. You're not going to be able to carry this on your ship - it's much, much too heavy to have around when you can just pack enough military rations, granola bars, or what-have-you to keep people fed for a trip that takes less than 10 years. Food would mostly be low-moisture, as you can rehydrate it from the water supply, which gets recycled with at least 80% efficiency, and more if you're willing to pay for it.

 I have some notes on the Sociology page regarding this. In theory you could cram a batch of people into a much smaller space than the area used to create a functional biosphere for them. The problem is, they won't stay mentally healthy for very long. My plan calls for space allowances per person that are really very large. Also, with permaculture and aquaculture and tray stacking methods, a single person can in theory eat from a tray stack system only 5 feet wide and long and 6 feet tall. They'd be eating nothing much other than sprouts and soybeans, but you get the point.

-- Very good point i hadn't given that much thought to. I had assumed that the waste systems, for instance, on the X1 would rely on mechanical processes because theres too little overall room. Thanks for an important point.
 * This is also why your airmaker and watermaker are going to be mechanical, not biological. A biological system doing this, in addition to being suceptible to disease, weighs far too much. The closest we've gotten to doing this was a Russian system that tried to use algae grown on wet canvas to recycle air, and that experiment was done for a relatively _short_ time, on Earth, not in space. You're going to end up with mildew and other crud competing with the algae long before you reach your destination, and will need a lot of algae. The mechanical systems for this are very straightforward to build and maintain, and are lighter than the supplies they conserve for trips over a year or two. They just take power, which you'll have lots of from the drive.

- Wow, Thanks, thats fascinating. --
 * "Reducing atmosphere" means an atmosphere rich in hydrogen, as opposed to oxygen. In a reducing atmosphere, you have mostly methane and ammonia and water. In an "oxidizing atmosphere", by contrast, you have free oxygen, free nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water. Earth and Mars have oxidizing atmospheres. Titan has a reducing one. If I recall correctly Venus has an oxidizing atmosphere, but it's inhospitable enough to never be colonized (very high pressure, very high temperature, very corrosive due to sulphur dioxide forming sulphuric acid in combination with atmospheric water). Most airless bodies in the inner solar system give you the same chemicals as an oxidizing atmosphere (the moon is aluminum and silicon oxides, mostly, with a few percent iron, titanium, chromium, phosphorus, and so on). In the outer solar system, you get icy worlds, which are oxygen-rich but have hydrogen bound into water. They're perfect for colonization, because hydrogen is probably the thing you'll run out of most.

- I was thinking of centripetal force and not going after any rock smaller than a few hundred meters in diameter. Large gravity wells are a pain in the but, and Mars is actually a very poor Colonization Target because it has just enough gravity to make centripetal artificial G systems seriously problematic, and just too little enough gravity sos that muscle atrophy is an issue. The best objects, I agree, for instance, the most ideal sort of object is Ceres, the moons of Jupiter and so forth are great targets also.
 * Don't bother with small asteroids and ring particles until much later. You want something big enough to have gravity, but small enough that you can launch from it cheaply. The moon is about as big as this gets. An asteroid like Ceres is about as small as this gets. The icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn are perfect. Mars is big enough that it's expensive to launch from, but it has all of the elements you need, and an atmosphere, so it's probably also a good colony site.


 * Launch from any world will probably be via chemical rockets, because they're the only really high thrust drive we have. That's why it's so expensive (Earth is _barely_ small enough that we can get off it with chemical rockets at all). Anything the size of the moon or smaller can be launched from with a reusable LOX/methane craft, which is simple enough to build and fuel with the equipment your colony ship will already have.

-  I am not a rocket scientist, but my understanding was that "Nuclear Powered" Rocket is really a very large category with a lot of very different outcomes. The thrust systems which I had looked at were primarilly very high thrust, but with the serious drawback of generating radioactive backwash. This may not be what you are thinking of, I doubt it is. If its just nuclear _powered_ and not actually nuclear in the ignition chamber, then you get what you seem to be talking about. Nuclear Thrust of the first type is even stronger than chemical thrust. But then theres the other problems. - --- Interesting. Others had led me to believe that Nuclear power was a good solution for small craft. I'm not committed either way, but I do know that the ramrocket engines i favor would require a nuclear power source. I'm not a rocket Scientist, just a Psychologist and a Sociologist and an Ecologist.
 * Exhaust from the fission drive won't be very radioactive. A small fraction of the hydrogen will get transmuted to deuterium, but deuterium isn't radioactive either. You'll get trace contamination from erosion of carbon and tungsten from your PBR fuel pellet casings, but this is _not_ desired, because it reduces the life of your engine. A nuclear engine isn't quite high thrust enough to launch from Earth, and isn't politically usable on Earth, but anywhere else you don't have to worry about it (as long as jetwash isn't pointed directly at your colony). Background levels of radiation from space will be much, much higher.
 * Fission drives have to be much more carefully maintained than chemical rockets, so you won't have many of them if you can avoid it. They'll be the big drives on interplanetary ships. All shuttles will be based on chemical rockets. Colonies will have fission plants, which were probably the drive reactors from the ships that founded the colonies, plus extra equipment for electricity generation if the drive was originally a NERVA-style hydrogen-through-PBR design.

- I had visualized that for small moons, somehow it seemed odd for larger moons. Space Elevators was also a pretty good option in my mind. Cost seems to be a non-issue if you can get those robot armies to work. Big if, but hey, IF, then its really just a matter of getting the bots there and getting them started.
 * Launching from an airless world will in the long run be done with a mass driver (think "maglev train run at several km/sec off an open-ended track"). This is expensive enough to build that it won't happen until your colony has a GDP in the range of at least $1 billion, but it's how you'd get large amounts of building material for a permanent space station colony or what-have-you. You can't do this from any world that has an atmosphere, even one as thin as Mars's.

- Yes, mining in microgravity would be highly problematic. There are a number of different groups working on the theories of the problem, and a lot of interesting answers out there. If we are going to make large Colonies or ships, materials will proove to be cheaper to mine from Asteroids than lift from Earth or the Moon. - --- Are you taking into account the ramscoop principle here? I think you are right on if you are talking a Ship thats destined to leave our solar system and possibly a bit over the top for a ship whose destination is sedna. ---
 * Mining asteroids is a royal pain in the tail. If at all possible, mining will be done where there's gravity and an atmosphere. Planets are great big balls of metals and useful minerals, so I just don't see the advantage. The only exception is that you might break off a tiny chunk of an icy body and tow it to an established colony on the moon, to give you carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. It might be cheaper just to haul up refined chemicals from a colony elsewhere and ship them, though.
 * Almost all of the mass of an interplanetary ship will be mass that has to be thrown away: reaction mass used by the drive. Even for an electric drive, travel time requirements mean working with as low an exhaust velocity as you can, which means higher thrust but higher mass consumption. Take the mass of anything that doesn't have to be thrown away, and multiply it by 10 to get the reaction mass you need to carry. That's why the colony ships I specced had 300 tonnes dry weight but 3000 tonnes of fuel. For a high-thrust nuclear drive, the reaction mass has to be hydrogen. Otherwise you lose the exhaust velocity advantage over chemical rockets. For a Hall effect thruster, it can in principle be anything, so you can use oxygen or nitrogen or what-have-you from lunar rock. However, I don't think a nuclear-electric craft will get you to the outer solar system in a reasonable length of time if it's a colony ship. Colonizing incrementally doesn't help you much - you still have several AU between outer-system planets, so every step is a very big one.


 * Equipment breaks down. Complicated equipment breaks down faster. This is why I don't think automated colony ships will work (besides being incredibly complicated and ludicrously expensive), and why I don't think trips with a travel time above about 5 years are practical with humans on board (the systems maintaining the environment are as simple as we can make them, but still pretty complicated).

I had encountered this issue before, and its a complicated one. I think that things do break down, but that they can be built in theory to last at least as long as 5 or 10 years. In any case, I'm using a plan that essentially uses 3-7 year hops from orbit level to orbit level, so I think that is doo-able. You do have a good point in that total automation won't be a very good idea- You still want human oversight on Robot activity.

Something to think about- IF Robot armies of self replicating and construction types do become reality, "cost" becomes a very different thing to define than it is now.

--- I had forseen a lot of entertainment, including games and video games. I wouldn't put a swimming pool on a ship, thats just the emergency water tanks i was talking about. That wouldn't be for swimming, but it would be as large as a small swimming pool.
 * Cultural problems and mob-tyrrany among the crew are far less of a problem than simply keeping them from getting bored out of their skulls, or hating each other because they're all effectively sharing an apartment that they can't get out of for years on end. The key to this, besides carefully screening crew for conflicts before launching, is to give each person personal space they can retreat do and rearrange, and to give everyone the best library, computer, gaming system, and TV you can. These are relatively light, and let people entertain themselves when they're sick of the group. You'd also have a "living room" type of space with an entertainment centre as well, for group entertainment, as well as board games and what-have-you for social relaxation. There'll be a (compact, lightweight) gym, to reduce bone loss and similar problems, but most people don't entertain themselves physically that way, and a facility for swimming or sports is far, far too heavy to put on a spaceship.

-  In crew groups over 30 or 40, I think you are right. There are some strange problems that happen only with very small groups that are driven by subliminal psychosexual motivators. Honestly, it seems counter-intuitive, but the best solution for a really small crew if you want one is a stud male and a batch of lesbians. -
 * Similarly, happily-married couples are a good idea. Otherwise you'll get sexually-driven tension between crew members either on the ship or once the colony is established.

-- I had the same three containers but had a fourth container for the drive apparatus including nuclear power system, and put the two rotating cylinders right next to each other instead of seperating them. -
 * To avoid health problems, the ship will consist of three big containers. The central one has the drive and fuel tank, which don't rotate. The other two are connected to the central hub by cables, and spin around the hub for gravity, counterweighting each other. One has the crew and everything they need on the trip. The other has everything they don't need on the trip but will need when they establish the colony. If you try to keep humans in zero gravity for years on end, they won't be much good to you when they arrive at the destination. The interplanetary drive doesn't have thrust high enough to produce noticeable gravity.

All of these points pretty much _have_ to be the case for a successful colonization project. Otherwise you end up needing a ship far more massive than you can build, or far more complicated than you can build, and probably far more expensive than you can build given either of those two, and one that takes long enough to reach its destination (any destination) that it's very unlikely to arrive with the crew alive and ship intact. I hope you see why I made each of the specifications I did above. --Christopher Thomas 22:50, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

 Yes, it is a very serious and dangerous game to design spaceships, and I think we both have a pretty good handle on the main problems and obstacles. Thanks so much for your input. -

Addendum: --- <Pan> Kewl, I guess then that you found ThinkStarship by some amount of personal interest.
 * I found you by checking the edit history for the "ThinkStarship" project. You're the main one working on it.

--

-- <Pan> I still think we should hope for the best but see what we find when we get there and plan for the worst.
 * Airless worlds give you everything you'd get in an oxidizing atmosphere, _except_ hydrogen, for inner-system bodies like the moon and asteroids in the belt (almost no water).

--Christopher Thomas 22:53, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Second response to brain dump commentary
- I hope you will forgive me for being brief. I spent about a half hour or so on this and your edit conflict deleted it all.

Regarding space drives, you seem to have some odd ideas, --- I'm feeling pretty sensitive to "odd" ideas lately. I have some good ideas and some mediocre ideas. All of my ideas are pretty well covered by science on the one hand and my willingness to allow process to be what it is, not what i assume on the other. Please forgive me if this sounds annoyed, but all i am doing here is trying to get the experts together to get them to solve the problems, not pretend that i allready have the answers. -

and to be grouping several different ideas together. Specifics of the different drive options are:


 * Chemical rockets. The best delta-v you can get for reasonable fuel amounts is about 5 km/sec. Maximum acceleration is several gravities (say about 30 m/s^2). These are used for your shuttles only, and probably for launching equipment from Earth.

-- This is all very interesting and i hope that you will consider making a presentation of this kind of information in the actual document. Otherwise, I'll have to find somebody like you and beg them to do it, and i am not likely to find somebody who is as sympathetic for the most part as you seem to be.
 * Nuclear-thermal. This involves making a pebble-bed reactor core (a bunch of marble-sized spheres of uranium clad with graphite and coated with tungsten), letting it heat up to about 2500 degrees C, and running hydrogen through it. The hydrogen heats up and sprays out the end of the rocket. Because hydrogen has a much lower molecular weight than the products of rocket fuel combustion, it's moving much faster at any given temperature. This gives you a delta-v of around 10-15 km/sec, at most, with a reasonable amount of fuel. Maximum acceleration is probably in the 0.01 to 0.1 gravity range (about 0.1 to 1 m/s^2). If you're willing to accept a travel time on the order of 5-10 years, you can use this kind of engine for your ships, and use gravity assists to get you where you're going. You don't have enough delta-v to get anywhere else (other than the moon) in a shorter period of time. Outer solar system could take more than 10 years.


 * Nuclear-electric or solar-electric. This involves using either a nuclear plant or a solar panel array as an energy source, and using an electric drive to move a working fluid (usually a heavy noble gas like xenon, for ease of handling and ionization, but it can be almost anything else you can turn into a gas). Options like ion drives and older-style plasma drives have problems with the electrodes eroding, but a Hall effect drive will work quite well. The downside is that thrust is very low. This is an unavoidable problem, because the thrust per unit power goes down inversely as your specific impulse (and so delta-v per weight of fuel) goes up. You'd need a power plant with a very high power to weight ratio (lightweight, high power) for this drive to be useful. It's probably still the only option for outer solar system colonization, but trips could take decades.


 * The "nuclear drives for small craft" you'd heard about were probably radiothermal electric generators powering electric drives. These aren't reactors; they're subcritical amounts of material that decay fast enough to get warm. Thermocouples draw power off of the heat gradient that results. They're fine for extremely light probes that are allowed to take decades to get anywhere, but aren't useful for small craft. A "reactor" is an assembly of nuclear fuel that catalyzes its own decay, producing much higher heat output for a given amount of weight. They're useful, as noted above, but have a certain minimum size (a few tons for anything shielded).

These drive designs are well-studied enough that we could build them right now, with off-the-shelf parts, if we wanted to. More exotic options you seem to have been made aware of are:

- I think that this is the primary form of "nuclear powered" rocket which i had been exposed to, but it was described very differently from what you have here. The bombs were going off almost inside the engine.
 * Nuclear pulse propulsion with bombs.

This involves building a ship weighing hundreds of thousands of tonnes with a big shock-absorber under it, flinging nuclear warheads in front of the shock absorber, and setting them off. The design (Orion) was studied extensively in the 1950s and 1960s, but is outright impossible to implement for political reasons. You need to amass a _really huge_ stockpile of warheads, and the ship itself is a mobile bomb-thrower with immense destructive potential, so nobody will let anyone else build one, and the radioactive plume out the back prevents it from being used for ground-to-orbit work, which is what it's mostly useful for.


 * Nuclear pulse propulsion with inertial confinement fusion. This involves building a small ship with a magnetic field acting as a rocket nozzle, firing pellets of frozen deuterium into the field pinch, and zapping the pellets with lasers or particle beams to initiate fusion. The problem is that we've been trying to build inertial confinement fusion systems for decades, and still don't have one that produces a beneficial amount of power. The pellets are also extremely difficult to make and handle, due to symmetry requirements, and the laser installation is the size of a large building, not counting power plant for the lasers. So, this isn't happening any time soon.

-- Thats not true, my one claim to reasonable knowledge is that i found out 20 years ago basically what you are saying and was so heartbroken than i tinkered the idea up a lot to make it work in any case. My ramscoops aren't used for much in most cases other than to get more speed once allready moving, and they are nuclear powered magnetic/plasma driven, which means that they double as a magnetic thrust system. --
 * Bussard ramscoops. You keep mentioning these, but you don't seem to realize where they were intended to function.

Even in Bussard's original models, you have to be travelling extremely quickly for them to work (delta-v of hundreds of km/sec needed to boost to that speed before ignition). They were meant as interstellar craft (launched, expensively, at the speeds required, and then boosting to much higher speeds). The problem is that this type of drive doesn't actually work at all. First, you're trying to fuse the trace amounts of deuterium in the already-very-tenuous amounts of hydrogen in the interstellar medium. This means most of the hydrogen that passes through your drive is inert, causing problems but giving no benefit. Second, the magnetic field ends up deflecting far, far more hydrogen than it pinches to fusion density. This means that even if you built a ramscoop and launched it at the required speeds, instead of igniting and speeding up, it actually just plows into the interstellar medium and slows _down_ without igniting. The drive was popularized in fiction dating from the middle of the 20th century, but will never actually be possible in practice for this reason. Even if it did magically work, it wouldn't be useful for colony work, for the reason mentioned above (you have to be going fast enough to use it that you don't need it if you have the means to get that fast in the first place).

Additional points:


 * Regarding moving out in "waves", you don't seem to realize

This isn't true, i do know how big space is, and, this is why i am talking about asteroid colonization, you see, a key component of the plan is to piggyback onto objects that are allready traveling around the solar system. Cruithnes closest pass is only abit farther out than the moon. ---

exactly how empty space is, and how far apart useful sites are. The moon is the only thing we can reach quickly from Earth. Getting anywhere else, at all, means changing radius by 0.5 AU going in to Venus (which we don't want to, for reasons mentioned previously), or 1 AU out to Mars. Large bodies in the solar system are more or less set up in a geometric progression, so getting from anywhere else to anywhere else involves travelling at least 2 AU and usually more. Any of these trips takes years or longer, depending on delta-v available (you probably don't have the delta-v to do a straight transfer orbit for objects in the inner solar system, so you have to use an Earth or Moon flyby after one complete orbit at Earth's distance from the sun before going anywhere). Any of these trips also takes large amounts of delta-v to do at all, as noted in my first post.


 * Think of the Earth/Moon system as a double planet, for this reason. It's one location, and travel from Earth orbit to Lunar orbit is easy (though surface launches from Earth are prohibitively expensive, and soft-landing on the moon or lifting off from it takes quite a bit of fuel).


 * It's not just human health that's affected by microgravity. Microgravity mucks up just about any industrial process developed on Earth (i.e., that we have significant experience with and understanding of). If you're building any kind of machinery, including your airmakers and watermakers and refinery/smelter, you want it to operate in gravity if at all possible, even if it's low gravity. This is why you'd colonize the moon to mine material for large projects, and colonize moons of Jupiter, and Mars, and only the really big asteroids before even thinking about doing anything with the small rocks in the belt. In the outer solar system, where water can exist as ice in vacuum, you might break off chunks of small icy bodies to tow back to refineries on moons, but you'd only do this if you didn't have material already available, and just about all of the outer solar system moons have ices already.

Been here also. An old proffessor freind of mine ran me through a thought experiment which demonstrated how problematic things could be. The stuff i had designed up blew up, fell apart, launched away from the asteroid, the asteroids dust created by mining, etc etc etc i have contemplated these problems and still consider going after small rocks to be the best early tactic. I am not alone in this, a lot of other people have similar ideas. - -- I'm only betting on a 15 year flight time from earth to pluto. I think thats conservative and fair, and if it doesn't work out that way, i will be fine with it. -- -- untrue, i am actually an expert in Sociology, so, even tho i am only a hobbyist in physics, i have knowledge at deep levels for the humanities, those are the bases i do have covered as well as anybody is going to.
 * For pack psychology vs. tribal psychology, remember that you're only dealing with a small group for as long as it takes to establish the colony infrastructure. Each subsequent ship, or subsequent ferry run if it's one ship moving back and forth, brings around 30 more people, because you're not hauling colony infrastructure equipment. As long as the small group only has to last 5 years or so, you're fine. This is why a fast transport is desirable (though not necessarily _possible_).
 * You also seem to be overlooking exactly how nasty small-town politics gets.

As long as the group is small enough that everyone knows most of the others, or a large fraction of the others, social structures freeze in place. The threshold for this seems to my uneducated guess to be around a thousand people. This also determines how unusual someone can be and still find like-minded people (if your hobby or mindset is 1 in 100, then you can find like minds in a 1000-person town, but not if you're at 0.1% or less). Large towns of 10,000 or more would be required to reduce these effects. Either way, you're not going to haul that many colonists over, so in practice you're starting with 50-100 people, and hoping they sort themselves out after a few generations of large families. --- i have info posted on group sizes and will add more as the occasion and time permit. - -- I think broad band communication with earth is a good idea and am sorry you seem to think that my comments indicated otehrwise. All I am saying is that theres a balance here, and that we don't want our people fixated on earth.
 * This is another reason why communication with Earth is a good thing. It gives anyone alienated on the colony a support network of like-minded individuals (for better or for worse).

-- Again, I am not a physicist and i don't do algebra. I have on the other hand studied ecology sciences in pretty good depth, and I think i know what is possible. I'd be going for a garden as soon as the ships got into space because i know thats the best way to do it. ---
 * Growing food by hydroponics has just as many problems as making a biological airmaker: it takes a lot of power (plants are inefficient), and is suceptible to infection and other maintenance problems. The weight in dried food lasts quite a while and can be stored for years. You'd only start growing things when you could get light for free (a greenhouse on an inner-system world). Outer-system colonies would either need large concentrator mirrors, or would need to spend a very large amount of power, or would just have supplies shipped in periodically. On a spaceship, it's not volume that's a problem (for things that don't need shielding), but weight of the apparatus, and amount of power needed (which means weight in the power plant).


 * You'd only use a maglev launch system on a body with an escape velocity of about 1-2 km/s or more. This means the moon. Mars (like Earth) would _benefit_ from one but can't build one because of the atmosphere. Smaller bodies don't have an incentive to build one, because chemical shuttles work fine. Very small bodies, with escape velocities on the range of 100-200 m/s, would use short launch tracks of the type found on aircraft carriers on Earth, but that's a very different type of system (much cheaper to build).

Never even thought of that kind of launch system. The space elevators are the product of a visitor who hasn't returned. If he does return, I'll be asking him to justify some of his ideas, more or less --
 * The only worlds where a space elevator makes sense are Earth and Mars, because they're rotating quickly, have atmospheres preventing magnetic launches, and are massive enough that chemical rockets are very expensive to use. They're very big, very expensive to make, and very annoying to maintain, so if other options are usable, other options would get used. In practice, Mars is the only place I'd expect to see one, because an elevator for Earth requires materials we don't know how to make yet.

-- It solves more problems than it generates.
 * A rotating base colony-side is an interesting idea, but you'd avoid it due to mechanical annoyance if possible.

Any world with 0.1 gravities or more would keep humans adequately healthy, though they'd have trouble if they went down to Earth. - Muscles atrophy probably in less than .4 G.

Ceres is 1000 km wide. I'd be reluctant to colonize anything smaller than 500 km, due to the difficulties microgravity causes industry. Typical outer solar system moons are thousands of km wide. --- Centripetal force makes smaller rocks a lot more interesting to start with. ---

- I think we more or less agree, just minor variations in implementation.
 * You want rotating parts of the ship to be on as long a baseline as possible. This makes the rotation rate as low as possible. Quickly rotating ships cause motion sickness problems, and sometimes mechanical nastiness due to the coroilis effect. This is why I specced the crew compartment to be at the end of a long cable. You only need one other rotating module, as a counterweight. You don't want the drive module to move relative to the ship's centre of mass, so it can't rotate. This gives you three modules, per my previous outline.


 * We're going to have to agree to disagree on the "armies of robot workers" thing.

I think that you are missing the point. I am a realist and a pragmatist. I know that there are serious problems to be solved. I am anxious for us to start working to solve them. If we don't have operational robots in time to lanch the first ships, then we will have other things to do wha they might have. The main thing is I am just trying to get the problem solving process going. If we assume it won't work and don't try to solve the problems, then of course, it won't work, and thats one way we won't solve any problems. If we assume it will work, and find out as we work on it that it won't, at least we will be working on the problem, and maybe in a generation or two it will be useful. I am not stupid nor am i a crackpot. I just want to get people working on solving the problems in a realistic way. Short term, I just want to use the basic premise to write a whole hoarde of themed textbooks. I'm not pretending to have any answers i don't have, I am just stringing things together as best as i can figure and hoping that will suffice until physics folks like yourself string them together even better. I'm not ego attached here, I am seriously and honestly seeking a group effort based on reason, science, logic, and what is real.

They'd be far, far more complex than any system we've designed to date, and the expense and difficulty of designing a system goes up extremely quickly as complexity is increased. The chance of it actually working goes down very quickly as complexity is increased. This is why I'm not optimistic about the technology for fully autonomous, self-replicating factories and robots being developed within any useful planning horizon. You're correct about it radically changing how you'd implement projects, but there are lots of technologies that would have effects like that. None look like they're happening in the near future.

I hope this explains why I made some of the statements I did previously. --Christopher Thomas 130.63.92.157 23:33, 19 April 2006 (UTC) -- I am sorry, the second response isn't as good as the first. I truly appreciate you and your input. I hope that you will come over and make these presentations to the areas that need it. If not, I will have to find somebody with your knowledge who will.