John, thank you for the brilliant science update. Dreamers are the ones that have guided society in the most beautiful ways, yet it is the skeptics and fear mongers whom have limited our possibilities. Copernicus and Galileo both pushed science forward and yet it was the push back from the church that slowed down the pace of progress. Similarly NASA in its early years saw no limit to its dreams. However the realities of the great society and regional wars limited its success. The dreams of SpaceX, massive telescopes. Sublight travel hopefully will push our world forward, yet the “small” minded people focused on the mundane day to day issues may slow the progress of societal progress. The “Star Trek” vision of the future may be a reality one day, but only if people have a vision of a bigger world or worlds not tied to this planet’s gravity.
The government wrote a check for eight times NASA's annual budget to murder the friends and family of our partners on the ISS. But when NASA asks for money, the green eyeshades and red pencils come out.
But I'd like to recommend a YouTube channel called "Eager Space". He makes a lot of good observations, and he's explained why some of the things I wish we would do in space aren't happening.
I'd amend your observation just with this: "... billions for war, pennies for space." I believe more has been hosed down a rabbit hole for war than for the poor. And this, from a retired bomber pilot...
No, skeptics have not limited anything. They tend to anchor minds in reality which is a good thing. Many dreamers are normally stoned as in drug induced digital hallucinations, looking for utopia. 2 pennies worth.
(Suggested music to your post: Gustav Holst, The Planets, Op. 32)
A nice cleansing of the palate this, my personal association making me think of Sonnegewehr aside.
That's my fear, that such a cloud /would/ be used as weapon of leverage no matter what private tech-bro who initially built it. Consider the Internet, what it was just 20 years ago, and what it is now, control-wise.
Now imagine the Biden-regime or Gates of Hell or the WEF being able to increase the average yearly mean temperature with 2C-3C over a significant agricultural area they have designated an "enemy" - Russia's interior f.e. "No harvest for you, russkie bratya".
A Moon-base if of course a given necessity no matter what it is for. Far better to develop construction sites off-planet than on, eventually. The VDA* must be built out of something, and while it obviously can be Solar-powered, parts wear out and needs replacing, making a Von Neumann-system of attendant AI-powered drones the probable solution.
(If this makes you think of Call-Me-Kenneth, congratulations: you're well-read on pop-culture and has good taste.)
Another thing - I might have missed it in your text? - is (relativistic) debris damaging the array. Bit hard to fix things in Pluto's orbit, unless the entire thing is automated and has ability to be completely self-sufficient from local materials. Actually building Station Tombaugh might become a reality somewhen - I sure hope so!.
*VDA = Very Dangerous Array. From the Webcomic (now also in album form) "Schlock Mercenary", which for its genre is actually pretty good with the "sci"-part of sci-fi. The main characters lack decent sensors (especially FTL-ones) on their current ship, but one of them realise the hundreds of warheads they have onboard have sensors, comms and independent propulsion so they simply deploy their entire stock of ordinance as a "fly eye in the sky" and have the ship AI use it as a sensor-bay.
The comic is free-to-read on the homepage: caution - it's long, 20 years of it, one strip per day and the guy who made didn't miss an update once, not even when his local server-station burned down, and the art has been touched-up and also improves markedly over time.
Quite a few things in space can be weaponized, most especially spaceships. A giant mirror, however, is large and flimsy target. If it started getting used as weapon, relatively easy to throw rocks at it (of course, a swarm of mirrors is a different story...)
We should of course prefer that it is us, and not the WEFoids, who end up in control of such devices.
The Germans though of the vulnerability-issue: the original plan was that the concave inner surface would be filled with a liquid made from a metallic salt-compound, using centripetal (?) force to keep it smooth.
Of course, it's all moot since once you /are/ able to put something like that in orbit, anything with mass you can accelerate to X% of C is a weapon anyway. 2 tons of frozen turds in a 10 by 10 kilometer even grid hitting whatever at 33% of C equals ouch time.
> imagine the Biden-regime or Gates of Hell or the WEF being able to increase the average yearly mean temperature with 2C-3C over a significant agricultural area
Just two to three degrees? That would yield excellent harvests and nothing more. Worst weapon imaginable, compared to basically anything else.
Because raising the atmospheric temperature does in no way affect the water cycle or the weather patterns. That's why there's never any heatwaves and droughts at the same time.
Your hypothetical assumes very high climate sensitivity to minor changes in insolation, but the evidence doesn't support that. Mean temperatures have varied by more than a few degrees over recent human history with no problems. Moreover, as pointed out numerous times, that would be a very silly weapon even if it worked (which it wouldn't).
2C-3C is enough. I understand that you don't believe it because it is obvious you confuse natural changes, which are slow and swing back and forth year after year with an artificial energy-source pouring on constant light and heat on a limited area, 24/7/365.
Here's an experiment for you: place a plant under a heat/solar lamp and don't water it. Place an identical plant on the windowsill and water it at 1-10 days random intervals. Also, place a third plant outdoors.
Imagine living on a habitable moon of a Jovian world even bigger than Jupiter. I’d freak out seeing some gigantic mass of swirling gas dominating the sky.
That aside, I had never known about giant telescopes made of modular mirror arrays at various Lagrange points and things like that, but this sounds like a wonderful idea. Turning the solar system into a giant telescope is peak human ingenuity. The whole damn place is ours. Let’s do something with it.
I've always thought the sky would be quite beautiful on such a world. Imagine this vast, swirling, multicoloured globe stretching across half the sky, the other moons hanging beside it like little Christmas ornaments.
Any such world would be tidally locked. If you want an unobstructed view of the stars, just hike to the other side (when the orbit has taken it out of the view of the local sun, that is).
It would be... different, to say the least, and as John said quite beautiful, but I also think the sight of an immense gas giant looming over the skies would be rather intimidating too; nonetheless if the technology and the opportunity existed, I wouldn't need asking twice!
But to even the very first generation of people born there, I would imagine it would just be as normal and familiar a feature to them as the Moon and stars are to us, with some novel and amusing generational differences- 'Okay Mooner' anyone?
I also wonder what form astrology might take amongst the indigenes … would their wise men scry the future in the storm cells and cloud bands of their huge primary?
That's an interesting thought actually. Reading the stars or the positions of planets in the sky doesn't sound very impressive, mystical or romantic because everyone's future is boringly predictable if it's determined by that one giant planet filling much of the sky!
I wonder if some sort of superstitious beliefs or religious doctrine wold emerge of their own accord over a long period of time- assuming any such Earthly beliefs were left behind and the knowledge of such was never known by subsequent younger generations?
Would even the very journey from Earth, the Earth itself and The First Ones eventually hold a mythical or spiritual importance as the actual realities of the colonisation and settlement mission grew ever more hazy in the fogs of time as it receded into an ever-distant past?
There would probably be other moons which might play a role in their astrological system.
The native South Americans based their astrological system on the dark dust clouds in the Milky Way, rather than the constellations. People will generally fixate in whatever is visible.
It's my understanding that the Keck observatory houses the most based and red-pilled memelords in the entire landscape of Terran astronomy/cosmology. I think I read some stuff about it on Reddit.
Great stuff! Musk could do this, although it would cost multiples of $10 billion, but NASA.?...no chance....
But I think it would be much more useful to spend the money on getting there, where we could gather the information first hand...So that's where I would spend the money, which currently of course doesn't exist...I've been reading sci-fi since I was 6 years old, and continue to think that the Heinleins, Bears, Vances, and Asimovs had it right...we have to get off this planet before some piece of space junk obliterates, or sends us back to prehistory...
I doubt Musk will fund this - no money in it - but you never know.
Until we have warp drive, manned interstellar flight is a long way off. Assuming we're limited by light speed, interstellar travel will probably be much slower than light. Might take centuries for a generation ship to reach its destination.
In which case, having very detailed information on that destination could be extremely useful.
There’s ABSOLUTELY money in it. In the short term, you can do a thorough survey of the solar system. Knowing where everything is, the minerals and volatiles available, potential landing sites, visible weirdness etc, would save a metric fuckton on fuel.
Yes, knowing where things are is a very good idea.
But as things stand we are limited to Hohmann transfer orbits, and are talking decades to move around the asteroid belt. Exploiting space has longer payback periods than building cathedrals or the fusion power research programme.
If we could live forever, not a problem. As things stand, the main value is defensive.
As soon as we get any industry off world, what’s the bet the folks up there just flat ignore any restrictions on nuclear rockets technology that they don’t agree with?
Hell yes. That's one of the reasons the control system is slow rolling space development imo - they don't want large numbers of humans getting beyond their ability to control them.
I'm anti-space travel and this article has even me seething with rage at all the wasted opportunities! Sure I'd stay on earth, and live a boring ass life but if all these things are within our grasp or otherwise almost within it, and instead we're dealing with what we're dealing with it really drives home the point how much our leadership has screwed us all over!!!!!
Damn them. Maudit les.
I'm gonna say this John, hope you don't mind. One reason why I need to believe in God, and Jesus is to believe that there's an Enfer. I need to know the bastards that wrecked our nations, our civilizations are damned. Sorry but this was a good article, it just evoked a strange rage in me, I do apologize, and hope you'll forgive my peculiar outburst, not trying to taint this wonderful article. Can't recommend it enough.
Agreed, when I think of the old plans for bullet trains in Canada, or the faster travel some wanted to do to connect us to Japan I feel even angrier. Japan could be a few hours away rather than days away.
Bastards. And now they’re using tech to smash apart our nations, and open us up to invasion. At this point we need the technocrats out and replaced with abler more ethical and more driven men who are loyal to us not to whatever the hell they are loyal to.
I don't think they can really be described as technocrats ... Technocrats would be in favor of technological advancement. The regime clearly isn't, except along whichever narrow avenues facilitate improved surveillance and distraction of the livestock.
I.e. the people *actually* running the system who would build the techntopia. Your dream of some right wing overthrow is every bit as much of a LARPing cope as commie revolution.
Now imagine if Greco-Roman-Babylonian-Phoenician cultures had been able to continue their tentative advances into metallurgy, mechanics, optics, and such.
/Then/ rage at the heavens, for a certain clergy holding it all down for over 1 000 years.
Ever read Harry Harrison? He had a fun alternate history trilogy in which the Great Heathen Army interrupts the Christianization of Britain, and then precipitates an industrial revolution a thousand years early.
I have, long ago. Probably where the thought comes from. I've also read some sci-fi where the Aliens land during one of the Crusades (I think?) and the knights board their vessel, forces them to teach them how to use it then goes on a Galactic Crusade, found a Medieval Catholic Space-Empire. Don't ask me the title though, it might have been an online publication.
Knights in Space. Certainly the idea hasn't been mixed with Starship Troopers by a certain English miniatures-and-games workshop, couldn't have.
GW even said so under oath in court, in the Chapterhouse Studios-case in the US, that all their IP and ideas are 100% in-house without outside influence.
I’m actually not surprised that space travel didn’t stick around. It was at the extremely cutting edge of technology, and was unsustainable. (Moon flights were only a couple of weeks long, max, and NASA was able to persuade the astronauts to poop in a bag. Mars flights are months long, at least; you can’t expect even astronauts to hold it that long.)
Heh well, you probably could turn a 1-km mirror into a doomsday weapon. I think the Nazis explored this idea. But there are much easier ways of devastating the Earth from the orbital high ground!
Read “Live Free or Die” by John Ringo. The main character uses a distributed array of mirrors to focus sunlight and melt asteroids. And alien warships.
No need for a laser or focal point, when you can simply turn the ambient and yearly mean temperature up a couple of degrees Celsius. No harvest, changed weather patterns, no rain, and you can perhaps focus it so much you get temps up to close to boiling point when you need to take nest of bothersome "Threats to Our Democracy" out.
The original idea was called "Sonnengewehr", one of the hypothetical Vergeltungswaffen.
Mirror on one side, collecting energy and data, Orbital Nightcloak Array on the other. Add micro-wave emitters and you have a decent all-round weapons-system.
That "monster" telescope is one groovy concept and so is the Space Elevator. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was a visionary. Thanks for the educational and mind-expanding essay.
For targets like this you need devotion of humanity towards these goals like building the pyramids or another gigantic feat. We need a transcendental future which could unite humanity to work beyond their individual life span. That's why it will not happen imo. Everybody likes to read about the opportunities but people will not sacrifice their lives.
I'm glad you went where I jumped to, John - a million-kilometre sparse 'scope beyond the orbit of Pluto. Once you can make 10,000 of something, 100,000 is fairly straightforward. A million is not much harder.
Handmer mislabelled his proposal: it should be called Version 0.01 or Tinyscope.
Well there are definitely unique engineering challenges that come with scale. The components of a ‘small’ 100 km design parked in L2 are effectively stationary with respect to one another, whereas something on the scale of Pluto’s orbit absolutely has to take orbital dynamics into account. The architecture would need to be far more dynamic.
I don't believe such a thing is possible, but theoretically, if you were able to relativistically "jump" to a star system 66 million light years away or more, and built a sufficiently giant mirror-telescope in that system, you could look back at Earth and watch dinosaurs roaming around "in real time."
Reflective optics are pretty unforgiving. I wonder if a gigantic fresnel lens might be better. You'd need a huge focal length, but since you are going for insane magnification levels, long focal length is your friend.
Perhaps the cheapest approach would be a monster holographic optical element. Phase based holographic optical elements can have decent efficiency, but you need to get the graininess way down to avoid aliasing. (Aliasing is also your enemy when doing sparse arrays of mirrors. Echoed images of the star might overwhelm the planet you are looking for.) Also, the chromatic aberration is terrible for holographic optical elements. You'd need to measure one color at a time.
Finally, David Brin proposed using the sun's gravitational field as a lens. Now you are talking billions of miles for the focal length but a truly colossal aperture. For each angle you want to look at, you need the probe plus a second craft to shadow out the sun and its corona.
Lenses are an absolute bitch at scale, which is why every single modern telescope is a reflector and not a refractor. Maybe they can be manufactured in microgravity at the necessary precision, but it's not something I've looked into.
Using the Sun as a gargantuan gravitational lens is certainly an interesting thought. Spherical, so if you enclose it in a globe of instrumentation at the focal distance you can look in every direction.
I'm talking fresnel lens, like on an overhead projector or a lighthouse. Darken the transitions between rings and you have the lens equivalent of sparse reflector array -- sort of. The path lengths will vary, so phase information will be lost. Might not work with spread out individual photons....
On the other hand, a curved shell with either holographic diffraction patterns or Fresnel rings might do the trick... Must contemplate further.
Computing is not the bottleneck here. With CT scans you have short distances and super short wavelengths of light. For resolving planets it's longer wavelengths and stupendous distances. And you need amazing angular resolution to truly look at alien planets.
I guess computers can be used to microposition the mirrors when using a detached array. We need to keep things precise to a quarter wavelength of light. This is a challenge even in a Lagrange point. Will probably need to have a huge sheet of aluminized Mylar in between the sun and the telescope just to keep the light pressure off. And we need to make sure the thrusters that keep that shield in place don't ever shoot at the mirrors.
These things are so easy to build that we have to assume every alien civilization out there has one, and has been using it to watch us for a very long time.
Imagine the embarrassment of knowing for certain that alien life has established an intergalactic network of the most highly ascended intellects in the universe has been long observing us as potential candidates for visitation and offer of induction and guidance... only to groan in collective disappointment that Earth seems to have 'gone woke'...
Say you were an advanced but hostile xeno species, ancient beyond imaging, patient beyond words, and you wish to subjugate a planet without firing a shot.
But if I were that ancient life form observing patiently for thousands of years, or perhaps tens of thousands - maybe the last million or even longer - if I had the capability to watch life on a distant world lit by the glow of a different star for all that time, I suppose I could unleash a mind-virus and watch their species begin tearing each other apart, like watching antibodies attacking bacteria on a petri dish through a microscope....
But it sounds a little... boring.
I'd have a bit of fun grossly misuseing the sort tech I had at my disposal. Maybe catapult a magnetar of multiple solar masses along precisely calculated trajectory through interstellar space to collide with the Sun, and watch the amusing spectacle as the enormous gravity well of this comparatively tiny object wreaks absolute havoc on the planets and moons as it glides purposefully through the Solar system, sending them on erratic courses, moons and planets spinning out of control and banging into each other- and you get to see some big explosions at the end!
(I don't know if this is exactly what would happen; my knowledge of the hard science and mathematics involved is layman-tier compared to yours so I have to compensate with imagination- I always enjoy your articles about space btw :D)
OK, it doesn't not quite meet the definition of 'subjugation', but even with my cold, unimaginably intelligent and ancient alien lizard brain, I'd know how to party!
You really don't need to do physical beam combining. all you need is a reference distance (low power laser between craft) and you can recombine the individual images from the various mirrors digitally. That's how the radio telescope guys do synthetic apertures- all on the computer.
As long as you know how the individual mirrors are drifting, you don't "need" to hold them still.
We could get a synthetic aperture system that could image nearby exoplanets in 10 years. Better bang for the buck than a lot of the foolishness the govt. blows money on. ;-)
John, thank you for the brilliant science update. Dreamers are the ones that have guided society in the most beautiful ways, yet it is the skeptics and fear mongers whom have limited our possibilities. Copernicus and Galileo both pushed science forward and yet it was the push back from the church that slowed down the pace of progress. Similarly NASA in its early years saw no limit to its dreams. However the realities of the great society and regional wars limited its success. The dreams of SpaceX, massive telescopes. Sublight travel hopefully will push our world forward, yet the “small” minded people focused on the mundane day to day issues may slow the progress of societal progress. The “Star Trek” vision of the future may be a reality one day, but only if people have a vision of a bigger world or worlds not tied to this planet’s gravity.
Billions for the poor, pennies for space. We should have been sending manned expeditions to Mars on NERVA ships in the 80s.
But small minds are ever lacking vision, and eager to truncate the ambitions of those who possess it.
The government wrote a check for eight times NASA's annual budget to murder the friends and family of our partners on the ISS. But when NASA asks for money, the green eyeshades and red pencils come out.
But I'd like to recommend a YouTube channel called "Eager Space". He makes a lot of good observations, and he's explained why some of the things I wish we would do in space aren't happening.
Space is hard, and expensive, but most of what has held us back is bureaucratic sclerosis and high time preference.
I'd amend your observation just with this: "... billions for war, pennies for space." I believe more has been hosed down a rabbit hole for war than for the poor. And this, from a retired bomber pilot...
No, skeptics have not limited anything. They tend to anchor minds in reality which is a good thing. Many dreamers are normally stoned as in drug induced digital hallucinations, looking for utopia. 2 pennies worth.
(Suggested music to your post: Gustav Holst, The Planets, Op. 32)
A nice cleansing of the palate this, my personal association making me think of Sonnegewehr aside.
That's my fear, that such a cloud /would/ be used as weapon of leverage no matter what private tech-bro who initially built it. Consider the Internet, what it was just 20 years ago, and what it is now, control-wise.
Now imagine the Biden-regime or Gates of Hell or the WEF being able to increase the average yearly mean temperature with 2C-3C over a significant agricultural area they have designated an "enemy" - Russia's interior f.e. "No harvest for you, russkie bratya".
A Moon-base if of course a given necessity no matter what it is for. Far better to develop construction sites off-planet than on, eventually. The VDA* must be built out of something, and while it obviously can be Solar-powered, parts wear out and needs replacing, making a Von Neumann-system of attendant AI-powered drones the probable solution.
(If this makes you think of Call-Me-Kenneth, congratulations: you're well-read on pop-culture and has good taste.)
Another thing - I might have missed it in your text? - is (relativistic) debris damaging the array. Bit hard to fix things in Pluto's orbit, unless the entire thing is automated and has ability to be completely self-sufficient from local materials. Actually building Station Tombaugh might become a reality somewhen - I sure hope so!.
*VDA = Very Dangerous Array. From the Webcomic (now also in album form) "Schlock Mercenary", which for its genre is actually pretty good with the "sci"-part of sci-fi. The main characters lack decent sensors (especially FTL-ones) on their current ship, but one of them realise the hundreds of warheads they have onboard have sensors, comms and independent propulsion so they simply deploy their entire stock of ordinance as a "fly eye in the sky" and have the ship AI use it as a sensor-bay.
The comic is free-to-read on the homepage: caution - it's long, 20 years of it, one strip per day and the guy who made didn't miss an update once, not even when his local server-station burned down, and the art has been touched-up and also improves markedly over time.
That webcomic sounds great.
Quite a few things in space can be weaponized, most especially spaceships. A giant mirror, however, is large and flimsy target. If it started getting used as weapon, relatively easy to throw rocks at it (of course, a swarm of mirrors is a different story...)
We should of course prefer that it is us, and not the WEFoids, who end up in control of such devices.
The Germans though of the vulnerability-issue: the original plan was that the concave inner surface would be filled with a liquid made from a metallic salt-compound, using centripetal (?) force to keep it smooth.
Of course, it's all moot since once you /are/ able to put something like that in orbit, anything with mass you can accelerate to X% of C is a weapon anyway. 2 tons of frozen turds in a 10 by 10 kilometer even grid hitting whatever at 33% of C equals ouch time.
Rods from God, meet frozen space poop from Fenrir.
Well this took a dark yet humorous turn.
Me reading this at 2:44am.
> imagine the Biden-regime or Gates of Hell or the WEF being able to increase the average yearly mean temperature with 2C-3C over a significant agricultural area
Just two to three degrees? That would yield excellent harvests and nothing more. Worst weapon imaginable, compared to basically anything else.
Because raising the atmospheric temperature does in no way affect the water cycle or the weather patterns. That's why there's never any heatwaves and droughts at the same time.
Temperature has varied by more than that over the past 1000 years alone.
Re-read your own sentence and maybe you see the problem with your own reason, compared to my hypothetical.
Your hypothetical assumes very high climate sensitivity to minor changes in insolation, but the evidence doesn't support that. Mean temperatures have varied by more than a few degrees over recent human history with no problems. Moreover, as pointed out numerous times, that would be a very silly weapon even if it worked (which it wouldn't).
Again, re-read what I wrote and think about it.
2C-3C is enough. I understand that you don't believe it because it is obvious you confuse natural changes, which are slow and swing back and forth year after year with an artificial energy-source pouring on constant light and heat on a limited area, 24/7/365.
Here's an experiment for you: place a plant under a heat/solar lamp and don't water it. Place an identical plant on the windowsill and water it at 1-10 days random intervals. Also, place a third plant outdoors.
See which one dies first.
Imagine living on a habitable moon of a Jovian world even bigger than Jupiter. I’d freak out seeing some gigantic mass of swirling gas dominating the sky.
That aside, I had never known about giant telescopes made of modular mirror arrays at various Lagrange points and things like that, but this sounds like a wonderful idea. Turning the solar system into a giant telescope is peak human ingenuity. The whole damn place is ours. Let’s do something with it.
I've always thought the sky would be quite beautiful on such a world. Imagine this vast, swirling, multicoloured globe stretching across half the sky, the other moons hanging beside it like little Christmas ornaments.
I’m too used to a starry sky that I think I’d be freaked out. But you never know—maybe I’d like it.
Any such world would be tidally locked. If you want an unobstructed view of the stars, just hike to the other side (when the orbit has taken it out of the view of the local sun, that is).
“Just hike around the world, bro.” 🤣🤣🤣
But point taken.
It's a Moon, so it isn't that big ;)
It would be... different, to say the least, and as John said quite beautiful, but I also think the sight of an immense gas giant looming over the skies would be rather intimidating too; nonetheless if the technology and the opportunity existed, I wouldn't need asking twice!
But to even the very first generation of people born there, I would imagine it would just be as normal and familiar a feature to them as the Moon and stars are to us, with some novel and amusing generational differences- 'Okay Mooner' anyone?
I also wonder what form astrology might take amongst the indigenes … would their wise men scry the future in the storm cells and cloud bands of their huge primary?
That's an interesting thought actually. Reading the stars or the positions of planets in the sky doesn't sound very impressive, mystical or romantic because everyone's future is boringly predictable if it's determined by that one giant planet filling much of the sky!
I wonder if some sort of superstitious beliefs or religious doctrine wold emerge of their own accord over a long period of time- assuming any such Earthly beliefs were left behind and the knowledge of such was never known by subsequent younger generations?
Would even the very journey from Earth, the Earth itself and The First Ones eventually hold a mythical or spiritual importance as the actual realities of the colonisation and settlement mission grew ever more hazy in the fogs of time as it receded into an ever-distant past?
There would probably be other moons which might play a role in their astrological system.
The native South Americans based their astrological system on the dark dust clouds in the Milky Way, rather than the constellations. People will generally fixate in whatever is visible.
If you're that close to the gas giant, the radiation would kill you. If you're at a safe distance, the planet wouldn't be such an ominous sight.
If the moon has an atmosphere, it should protect you from high energy charged particles whizzing around in the magnetosphere.
It's my understanding that the Keck observatory houses the most based and red-pilled memelords in the entire landscape of Terran astronomy/cosmology. I think I read some stuff about it on Reddit.
First I've heard of this. Based if true.
Great stuff! Musk could do this, although it would cost multiples of $10 billion, but NASA.?...no chance....
But I think it would be much more useful to spend the money on getting there, where we could gather the information first hand...So that's where I would spend the money, which currently of course doesn't exist...I've been reading sci-fi since I was 6 years old, and continue to think that the Heinleins, Bears, Vances, and Asimovs had it right...we have to get off this planet before some piece of space junk obliterates, or sends us back to prehistory...
I doubt Musk will fund this - no money in it - but you never know.
Until we have warp drive, manned interstellar flight is a long way off. Assuming we're limited by light speed, interstellar travel will probably be much slower than light. Might take centuries for a generation ship to reach its destination.
In which case, having very detailed information on that destination could be extremely useful.
There’s ABSOLUTELY money in it. In the short term, you can do a thorough survey of the solar system. Knowing where everything is, the minerals and volatiles available, potential landing sites, visible weirdness etc, would save a metric fuckton on fuel.
Yes, knowing where things are is a very good idea.
But as things stand we are limited to Hohmann transfer orbits, and are talking decades to move around the asteroid belt. Exploiting space has longer payback periods than building cathedrals or the fusion power research programme.
If we could live forever, not a problem. As things stand, the main value is defensive.
Clearly, we're going to need better engines.
Absolutely correct that the payoff time for space is very long. It's the ultimate marshmallow test.
As soon as we get any industry off world, what’s the bet the folks up there just flat ignore any restrictions on nuclear rockets technology that they don’t agree with?
Hell yes. That's one of the reasons the control system is slow rolling space development imo - they don't want large numbers of humans getting beyond their ability to control them.
Agreed, but aliens are getting here somehow, so there is some fundamental science we haven't found yet...
I'm anti-space travel and this article has even me seething with rage at all the wasted opportunities! Sure I'd stay on earth, and live a boring ass life but if all these things are within our grasp or otherwise almost within it, and instead we're dealing with what we're dealing with it really drives home the point how much our leadership has screwed us all over!!!!!
Damn them. Maudit les.
I'm gonna say this John, hope you don't mind. One reason why I need to believe in God, and Jesus is to believe that there's an Enfer. I need to know the bastards that wrecked our nations, our civilizations are damned. Sorry but this was a good article, it just evoked a strange rage in me, I do apologize, and hope you'll forgive my peculiar outburst, not trying to taint this wonderful article. Can't recommend it enough.
It is infuriating when you realize how much further along we could already be, had we not gotten derailed back in the 70s.
Agreed, when I think of the old plans for bullet trains in Canada, or the faster travel some wanted to do to connect us to Japan I feel even angrier. Japan could be a few hours away rather than days away.
Bastards. And now they’re using tech to smash apart our nations, and open us up to invasion. At this point we need the technocrats out and replaced with abler more ethical and more driven men who are loyal to us not to whatever the hell they are loyal to.
I don't think they can really be described as technocrats ... Technocrats would be in favor of technological advancement. The regime clearly isn't, except along whichever narrow avenues facilitate improved surveillance and distraction of the livestock.
I stand corrected, what term would you use? I think you might be right about this one.
Central bankers? Gay race communists? Management? The parasites? So many options...
Banksters. Tech oligarchs.
I.e. the people *actually* running the system who would build the techntopia. Your dream of some right wing overthrow is every bit as much of a LARPing cope as commie revolution.
Nothing ever happens...
Now imagine if Greco-Roman-Babylonian-Phoenician cultures had been able to continue their tentative advances into metallurgy, mechanics, optics, and such.
/Then/ rage at the heavens, for a certain clergy holding it all down for over 1 000 years.
Ever read Harry Harrison? He had a fun alternate history trilogy in which the Great Heathen Army interrupts the Christianization of Britain, and then precipitates an industrial revolution a thousand years early.
I have, long ago. Probably where the thought comes from. I've also read some sci-fi where the Aliens land during one of the Crusades (I think?) and the knights board their vessel, forces them to teach them how to use it then goes on a Galactic Crusade, found a Medieval Catholic Space-Empire. Don't ask me the title though, it might have been an online publication.
Mind like a fly-paper, that's me.
That sounds like the High Crusade, by Poul Anderson (which I haven't actually read).
High Crusade is a classic. Worth reading.
That's the one!
Knights in Space. Certainly the idea hasn't been mixed with Starship Troopers by a certain English miniatures-and-games workshop, couldn't have.
GW even said so under oath in court, in the Chapterhouse Studios-case in the US, that all their IP and ideas are 100% in-house without outside influence.
David Weber and David Drake both explored this concept too. Nice to see great minds think alike.
I’m actually not surprised that space travel didn’t stick around. It was at the extremely cutting edge of technology, and was unsustainable. (Moon flights were only a couple of weeks long, max, and NASA was able to persuade the astronauts to poop in a bag. Mars flights are months long, at least; you can’t expect even astronauts to hold it that long.)
It took six weeks to sail between the Old and New Worlds, and many months to circumnavigate the Earth. Similar timescales.
I only understood half of that but my mind is still blown at the possibilities!
My stupid non physics mind kept wondering if these mirrors would end up frying the earth with giant mirror lazers though lmao
Heh well, you probably could turn a 1-km mirror into a doomsday weapon. I think the Nazis explored this idea. But there are much easier ways of devastating the Earth from the orbital high ground!
I'm more concerned that they will use it to look at my bald spot from space.
Yeah they did, the hypothesised 'Wunderwaffe' was known as the Heliobeam, or the 'Sun Gun'.
Yeah they did, the hypothesised 'Wunderwaffe' was known as the Heliobeam, or the 'Sun Gun'.
Btw, love the handle. Drizzt says hi!
Read “Live Free or Die” by John Ringo. The main character uses a distributed array of mirrors to focus sunlight and melt asteroids. And alien warships.
Great book. Love Ringo.
Maple syrup as an addictive alien narcotic was such a great touch.
No need for a laser or focal point, when you can simply turn the ambient and yearly mean temperature up a couple of degrees Celsius. No harvest, changed weather patterns, no rain, and you can perhaps focus it so much you get temps up to close to boiling point when you need to take nest of bothersome "Threats to Our Democracy" out.
The original idea was called "Sonnengewehr", one of the hypothetical Vergeltungswaffen.
More effective to turn the temperature down.
Mirror on one side, collecting energy and data, Orbital Nightcloak Array on the other. Add micro-wave emitters and you have a decent all-round weapons-system.
Sounds like we're playing 1st Era Traveller.
I thought of that Icarus satellite from that James Bond film which doubles as an orbital direxted energy weapon
The Vestern spy runs but he cannot hide! :D
That "monster" telescope is one groovy concept and so is the Space Elevator. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was a visionary. Thanks for the educational and mind-expanding essay.
Tsiolkovsky might be worth doing a deep dive on, one of these days. A visionary and a deeply weird man.
And he wrote such beautiful music.
Do you mean Tchaikovsky?
Yes. It was a joke.
Gotcha.
Can a project like this be progressed by any but a free and prosperous people? Not sure the planned slave state can pull this off.
More billions for the ever increasing poor, less even for space.
For targets like this you need devotion of humanity towards these goals like building the pyramids or another gigantic feat. We need a transcendental future which could unite humanity to work beyond their individual life span. That's why it will not happen imo. Everybody likes to read about the opportunities but people will not sacrifice their lives.
I'm glad you went where I jumped to, John - a million-kilometre sparse 'scope beyond the orbit of Pluto. Once you can make 10,000 of something, 100,000 is fairly straightforward. A million is not much harder.
Handmer mislabelled his proposal: it should be called Version 0.01 or Tinyscope.
Well there are definitely unique engineering challenges that come with scale. The components of a ‘small’ 100 km design parked in L2 are effectively stationary with respect to one another, whereas something on the scale of Pluto’s orbit absolutely has to take orbital dynamics into account. The architecture would need to be far more dynamic.
I don't believe such a thing is possible, but theoretically, if you were able to relativistically "jump" to a star system 66 million light years away or more, and built a sufficiently giant mirror-telescope in that system, you could look back at Earth and watch dinosaurs roaming around "in real time."
So, this wouldn't work inside the GR framework - unless you're talking about an Alcubierre drive or something.
That’s what I was suggesting- if it’s possible, which I’m doubtful of.
I am also extremely skeptical, though would love to be wrong.
Reflective optics are pretty unforgiving. I wonder if a gigantic fresnel lens might be better. You'd need a huge focal length, but since you are going for insane magnification levels, long focal length is your friend.
Perhaps the cheapest approach would be a monster holographic optical element. Phase based holographic optical elements can have decent efficiency, but you need to get the graininess way down to avoid aliasing. (Aliasing is also your enemy when doing sparse arrays of mirrors. Echoed images of the star might overwhelm the planet you are looking for.) Also, the chromatic aberration is terrible for holographic optical elements. You'd need to measure one color at a time.
Finally, David Brin proposed using the sun's gravitational field as a lens. Now you are talking billions of miles for the focal length but a truly colossal aperture. For each angle you want to look at, you need the probe plus a second craft to shadow out the sun and its corona.
Lenses are an absolute bitch at scale, which is why every single modern telescope is a reflector and not a refractor. Maybe they can be manufactured in microgravity at the necessary precision, but it's not something I've looked into.
Using the Sun as a gargantuan gravitational lens is certainly an interesting thought. Spherical, so if you enclose it in a globe of instrumentation at the focal distance you can look in every direction.
I'm talking fresnel lens, like on an overhead projector or a lighthouse. Darken the transitions between rings and you have the lens equivalent of sparse reflector array -- sort of. The path lengths will vary, so phase information will be lost. Might not work with spread out individual photons....
On the other hand, a curved shell with either holographic diffraction patterns or Fresnel rings might do the trick... Must contemplate further.
Computing continues to get cheaper, The resolution on medical CT and MRI machines gives a model for the progress.
Computing is not the bottleneck here. With CT scans you have short distances and super short wavelengths of light. For resolving planets it's longer wavelengths and stupendous distances. And you need amazing angular resolution to truly look at alien planets.
I guess computers can be used to microposition the mirrors when using a detached array. We need to keep things precise to a quarter wavelength of light. This is a challenge even in a Lagrange point. Will probably need to have a huge sheet of aluminized Mylar in between the sun and the telescope just to keep the light pressure off. And we need to make sure the thrusters that keep that shield in place don't ever shoot at the mirrors.
On the gripping hand, when I did a web search on using a fresnel lens for a telescope, I found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_imager
Fascinating! I'll need to read up on this.
In a choice between the Earth and the Open Sky America must choose the Open Sky.
I dislike the closing. We’ll build it, you frozen brained depressive Kanuckistani. Seriously, 💩
No moping about space.
No space moping.
We’ll build it, you can help, or 💨 off.
Space is the only real reason not to have a nuclear war .
In a choice between the Earth and the Open Sky America must choose the Open Sky.
Well, “let's build it” is kind of the point, man.
That’s not the rather downcast closing paragraph, but yes let’s do so no matter what.
The Dutch built their sea empire while at constant war with Spain for decades.
What if we look at an exoplanet with our Monster Telescope and see a monster telescope looking back at us! D:
I almost mentioned that!
These things are so easy to build that we have to assume every alien civilization out there has one, and has been using it to watch us for a very long time.
Imagine the embarrassment of knowing for certain that alien life has established an intergalactic network of the most highly ascended intellects in the universe has been long observing us as potential candidates for visitation and offer of induction and guidance... only to groan in collective disappointment that Earth seems to have 'gone woke'...
Heh.
I can turn that around, though.
Say you were an advanced but hostile xeno species, ancient beyond imaging, patient beyond words, and you wish to subjugate a planet without firing a shot.
How would you go about it?
Ha true- there's that...
But if I were that ancient life form observing patiently for thousands of years, or perhaps tens of thousands - maybe the last million or even longer - if I had the capability to watch life on a distant world lit by the glow of a different star for all that time, I suppose I could unleash a mind-virus and watch their species begin tearing each other apart, like watching antibodies attacking bacteria on a petri dish through a microscope....
But it sounds a little... boring.
I'd have a bit of fun grossly misuseing the sort tech I had at my disposal. Maybe catapult a magnetar of multiple solar masses along precisely calculated trajectory through interstellar space to collide with the Sun, and watch the amusing spectacle as the enormous gravity well of this comparatively tiny object wreaks absolute havoc on the planets and moons as it glides purposefully through the Solar system, sending them on erratic courses, moons and planets spinning out of control and banging into each other- and you get to see some big explosions at the end!
(I don't know if this is exactly what would happen; my knowledge of the hard science and mathematics involved is layman-tier compared to yours so I have to compensate with imagination- I always enjoy your articles about space btw :D)
OK, it doesn't not quite meet the definition of 'subjugation', but even with my cold, unimaginably intelligent and ancient alien lizard brain, I'd know how to party!
Well, that's the thing - annihilation is relatively easy. Subjugation is much harder.
There is a long ago SF short story called "The Look" which details a much more efficient low cost and low energy technique.
Look around you. One panel from "Academia is Women's Work" powerfully demonstrates the theme.
There is a theory that we are walled off by intergalactic network because we are too stupid to be allowed to go out there. Can't disagree.
You really don't need to do physical beam combining. all you need is a reference distance (low power laser between craft) and you can recombine the individual images from the various mirrors digitally. That's how the radio telescope guys do synthetic apertures- all on the computer.
As long as you know how the individual mirrors are drifting, you don't "need" to hold them still.
We could get a synthetic aperture system that could image nearby exoplanets in 10 years. Better bang for the buck than a lot of the foolishness the govt. blows money on. ;-)
Excellent point. This is probably how it will be done in practice. Beyond a certain size beam combiners become impractical.