Steps to Space
Still in progress ...
Neil Armstrong's "Giant Leap For Mankind" was one step among trillions, by billions of people for thousands of years. A milestone, but there will be thousands of milestones on the way to a living cosmos. Life found ways to profit (derive benefit from) every step along the path from inert matter to an Earth filled with life; as Earth life's ambassadors to the universe, so will we.
This webpage lists a series of steps we can take to the stars. Some steps are dependent on others, but the ordering presented here is one of many possible ways of sequencing those dependencies.
Some major milestones are:
- worldwide longterm prosperity
- space biology testing
- digital immortality
- server sky
- launch loop
- space solar power
- lunar materials
- complete space industrialization
- space settlement
- taming the solar system
- lunar NEO interception
- a Stapledon-Dyson shell
- preserving life on Earth beyond the Sun's lifetime
- filling the galaxy with life
Some steps to these milestones follow.
Kilogram Server Sky
First experimental thinsats strung together in 250 gram "box kites". Profits from kickstarter sales, chip radiation testing, scientific data collection in the van Allen belt, particularly particle trajectories and energies. See HitchHiker for details.
Radar Server Sky, space debris ephemerides
Thinsat arrays will make excellent transmitters and receivers for 60 GHz radar; hundreds of kilowatts of pencil-beam chirped energy and hectares of receiver area, backed by petaflops of computation and correlation. This permits a complete and precise mapping of space debris to sub-gram object size, allowing space assets to maneuver away from (or intercept) threatening debris objects.
Developing World Data Server Sky in MEO
Petabit data service to the cell towers serving three billion tropical people. The goals are to provide education, global connection, and digital employment opportunities to these people. They will be able to shape the global economy and contribute their cultural wisdom to the world without leaving their families. Worldwide longterm prosperity Server sky thinsats will be cheap enough for them to own as capital goods, providing collateral for credit transactions and assets protected from local corruption. Perhaps 1 terawatt of computation services delivered from 12789 km radius MEO orbits.
Second Generation Server Sky
MEO thinsat orbital stability requires a minimum mass of 100 grams per square meter (in sunlight); however, thinsats can be manufactured thinner than 10 grams per square meter, with on-orbit ballast added to stabilize orbits. Lumps of mass from space debris and retired thinsats are a good source of this mass, providing a profitable path to debris-free orbital space. Assuming 200 watts per square meter (averaged over the orbit, including self-occultation and night-side eclipse), that is 2 kilowatts per kilogram, and 1 terawatt of thinsats would be 500,000 tonnes. That might be composed of 50,000 tonnes launched from Earth, 10,000 tonnes of space debris and recycled thinsats, and eventually, more than 400,000 tonnes of lunar regolith welded into 2 gram ballast blobs.
Cutting up debris into ballast, and the production of regolith bricks, will be the first baby steps towards space manufacturing.
Radiation Belt Remediation by Server Sky
500,000 tonnes and 5,000 square kilometers of metal foil in MEO orbit will Rutherford-scatter radiation belt particles (mostly protons and electrons) into longer pitch angles, trajectories that intercept the upper atmosphere. That will rapidly deplete the belt regions that Server sky orbits through (L=1.8 to L=1.2 or so), creating a low-radiation zone that slowly spread as magnetic storms perturb neighboring belt regions into the depletion zone.
Thinsats will detect particle flux in order to predict and compensate for radiation-induced computation errors - precise time and space mapping of those particle events will generate exabytes of radiation belt scientific data. The van Allen belts will go away, but we will have excellent scientific records of what they used to be.
War-proof Space Assets
Server sky arrays may be disrupted by megaton nuclear weapons blasts within a few kilometers, but the radiation flux from a weapon will be only a year or two worth of natural radiation. The energy and momentum flux from the blast will deposit uniformly across the thinsat and the array, so the thinsats can thermally anneal radiation damage and reassemble as an array. Since radar-mode server sky arrays can compute a precise trajectory and launch source for the weapon, the culprit nation can be identified, isolated, and data-starved back to prehistoric poverty and cannibalism. Out of mercy, I hope a wealthy and civilized world will rescue and re-educate their innocent children, while documenting the brutal self-destruction of their insane parents.
Scientific and Commercial Computation at L4/L5
Humans and automated global stock trading demand fast response times from MEO server sky, but scientific data collection and computation (and the future equivalent of block chain computation) can tolerate 2 second round trip delays, from Earth to the LaGrange points. Inverse-square attenuation at 60 times the distance from the Earth's surface permits 3600 times as much illumination for the same night-sky light pollution as MEO server sky, with rare eclipses rather than 1/6 shading of the MEO orbit. More than 4 petawatts of computation power, 50 times the 80 terawatts of electrical grid energy that a rich and optimized planet Earth of 8 billion people might consume. Orbit stability mass requirements unknown; presuming 2 kilowatts per kilogram as before, that is 2 billion tonnes of thinsat. This will benefit from in-orbit manufacturing, with microchips and beneficiated elements from the Earth, and more common elements (oxygen, silicon, aluminum, iron, sodium, magnesium, and titanium) from the Moon.
Dangerous Biological Experiments in Lunar Orbit
While we can do much with computational biology, artificial lifeforms worry many people. While some worrywarts are ignorant, stirred up by equally ignorant demagogues, peer-to-peer server sky education can cure most of that; as Justice Brandeis observed, It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears. We can reduce real hazards to negligable proportions by testing artificial lifeforms in kilogram-scale experimental labs in lunar orbit, connected with high-bandwidth communication to L4/L5 arrays. Lunar orbits are unstable, they will eventually be perturbed into a surface impact. While we should try to direct these impacts into small "toxic waste dumps" on the Moon, orbital mechanics will prevent this material from ever reaching Earth, while cosmic radiation and Solar UV will add additional safeguards. This may seem like extreme paranoia, but eliminating parts-per-trillion risks to life on Earth is necessary for multi-billion year planetary survival.
As we spread into the solar system, we can move these experiments to inner orbits of Jupiter, inside heavily shielded containers. Nothing can accidentally escape Jupiter's gravity well besides broadcast information.
Stabledon-Dyson Shell
An 50 AU diameter ice substrate statite shell of nano-engineered computation, converting sunlight leaving the solar system into computation and 60 Kelvin infrared radiation. 380 trillion terawatts are available, and this will increase as the Sun evolves.
In the distant future, in construction for perhaps 1 million years. Most of that time will be needed to disassemble Oort cloud objects without vaporizing them. Some of the mass will be ejected from the solar system as targeted interstellar probes, ejecting the excess orbital angular momentum of the source objects.
Portions of the shell will act as an X-ray scattering barrier for the Earth when nearby stars go supernova, while the rest of the statites will turn edge-om to the flux, mimimizing absorbed dose and off-axis scattering. Interstellar expeditions to supernova candidates, monitoring core neutrino flux to measure the elemental composition of the core and predict exactly when the supernova occurs, will be part of the long term strategy for protecting nearby solar systems with life-bearing planets.
Digital Immortality
The Earth is finite. Whether it can support 8 billion people over billions of years, or less, if we choose to have children, we either die or go elsewhere. Meanwhile, the neurons in unmodified human brains do not replicate after development (pregnancy and a few weeks after birth), so even if we keep every neuron alive somehow, we face hard limits on the capacity of those brains.
However, we will someday internalize our digital tools, connecting them directly to our brains, speeding input and output, and more importantly conveying sensory data and adding manipulation capabilities that natural brains lack. Perfect memory, predictive-adaptive telepresence, the list of possiblities are endless, and plenty of early adopters willing to risk their lives and their sanity to try the new technologies first. The rest of us will learn from their mistakes and their successes.
In a few decades, there will be people who are mostly enhancement - as their biobrains decay, their enhancements remain and fill in the gaps, until the biobrains and bodies fail and the enhancements continue. Again, a dangerous and error-prone process, but so evolution, and biological life in general.
The Earth is a hot, corrosive, confined, resource-limited place to keep electronic intelligence; digital personalities will soon escape the Earth and into the abundant resources of the Stady shell.
Because the Stady shell is cold and stable against thermal damage, it can operate with 5x lower power per logical operation than the best possible electronics on the 300 Kelvin Earth. Neural operations are perhaps 25,000 electron volts each, and a "Shannon limit" digital operation might be 0.02 electron volts at 300 Kelvin, so a stady shell operation might be 0.004 electron volts, 1.6e-7 of the energy used by a neural operation. Even with 600 times the power (mostly for signal propagation, error and damage repair), a 20 watt human brain might be emulated with less than 2 milliwatts. There's room in a solar system Stady Shell for 2e29 human-scale minds, enduring for 10 billion years; in the whole galaxy, perhaps 1 billion times more.
There is no need to damage the Earth to do this; indeed, a vast amount of the shell can be devoted to protecting and enhancing the Earth into the distant future. That is 1 digital mind for every 25 living bacterial cells on Earth - even if only a tiny fraction of those minds focus their attention inwards, they can blanket our home planet with enough love and attention to keep it alive for a very, VERY long time.
Launch Loop Technologies
Diamond-coated iron pipes ("rotors") moving in moderate vacuums at 8 to 20 kilometer-per-second velocities can store enormous amounts of energy and momentum, and be deflected by Tesla-scale magnetic fields into loops and structures above the atmosphere. Magnetic attraction is unstable; measurement, computation, and electronic control is required for stability. However, control frequencies range from 1 to 100 KHz, and chips can perform trillions of computations per second, distributing the results over fiber optics 10,000 times faster than the rotor moves.
Terrestrial Power Storage Loops
Earth Launch Loop
Lunar Launch Loop
Phobos Tethers
Mars Launch Loop and Martian Settlement
space solar power
lunar materials
lunar NEO interception and asteroid materials
complete space industrialization
space settlement
taming the solar system
preserving life on Earth beyond the Sun's lifetime