Hypx

joined 1 year ago
[–] Hypx@kbin.social 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

Yes, that's the point. It's far beyond the actual city of Tokyo in terms of construction difficulty and scale. But it doesn't need any new technologies to be invented to be doable. Just the ability to build on that scale.

[–] Hypx@kbin.social 2 points 9 months ago (5 children)

This is sci-fi stuff. No one is seriously saying we could build this anytime soon. It will require a radical advancement in space travel capability. But the interesting part of this is that it doesn’t any new technology. It needs only the technology that we currently have, just scaled up massively.

As it is an O’Neill cylinder, the raw material needs will be truly huge. We’re literally building a city on the scale of Tokyo but in space. So we are just assuming that someday, we can move around that amount of stuff in space.

[–] Hypx@kbin.social 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (7 children)

The cheapest materials would be what can be acquired in space without having to launch from Earth. As a result, you're going to want to build your O'Neill cylinder out of some combination of iron, aluminum, titanium, and silicon dioxide.

The last of which might be particularly useful, as it is the main ingredient of fiberglass while also being the most common substance on Moon and asteroids. As a result, you probably want to build your cylinder primarily out of fiberglass. You can get pretty decently sized cylinders, as fiberglass has a higher strength-to-weight ratio than steel. Apparently, 24km diameter is a viable figure. Scale up length the same way, and you'll get 96km. So a 24km x 96km O'Neill cylinder made out of fiberglass.

That would be about 7238 km^2 of usable surface area. Half that to 3619 km^2 to make room for windows (as originally envisioned by O'Neill), and assuming a density comparable to New York City (about 11,300 people/km^2), you'll get around 40 million people. Or about the population of Tokyo.

That's seems plenty for any sensible space colonization strategy we might adopt in the future. And what's best is that you don't really need any fancy technology. Just use solar power to power mass drivers and deliver raw materials from the moon or asteroid via electricity. And it won't be any special materials either. Raw regolith can be made into fiberglass, so cost can be kept surprisingly low. The only question is scaling it all up, which may unfortunately be too expensive or will take a very long time to happen. Ultimately, this is still sci-fi, albeit on the hard side of it, since no fancy new technology is require.

[–] Hypx@kbin.social 4 points 9 months ago

You’re better off spending it on stuff like mass transit and the like. It won’t just all disappear at some point in the future.

[–] Hypx@kbin.social 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

You won't be saying that once the market crashes. You'll realize that there are much better ways of spending that money. Like far more practical emissions reducing solutions.

[–] Hypx@kbin.social 6 points 9 months ago (5 children)

Not really. It's mainly about gaining market dominance on a technology they think is the future. They'll build them right next to the massive coal plant alongside a million other things they're subsidizing.

[–] Hypx@kbin.social 6 points 9 months ago (11 children)

It's the result of massive subsidies. When they stop, this market will crash like a house of cards.

[–] Hypx@kbin.social 6 points 9 months ago

IOW, this is right-wing propaganda. And given her skin-color, you can add racism to that mix too.

[–] Hypx@kbin.social 31 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Blogs are a good idea. We should go back to them instead of being dependent on social media.

[–] Hypx@kbin.social 4 points 9 months ago

Itis impossible to get data that recent FYI.

Again, green hydrogen adoption is rapidly growing and is following the trajectory of wind and solar growth in the past. Your rhetoric is just mirroring the anti-wind and anti-solar rhetoric of the past. They too were always looking backwards. You will end up no different.

[–] Hypx@kbin.social 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Wrong. You have totally fallen for fossil fuel propaganda. All of that rhetoric originated from the oil and gas industry. After all, if "both sides are equally bad" then there would be no motivation to move away from fossil fuels. Unfortunately, the battery industry, which is really just an extension of mining industry and China's governmental policy, is adopting this type of rhetoric.

Again, you are 20 years out of date. As in more than one decade. As in literally decades out of date. You won't even google the term and yet you think you know everything. This is Ludditism at its purist.

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