perfessor multigeek's Journal: Livin' in The Kuiper Belt

So, I've been reading the fooforaw about new objects discovered in the Kuiper belt and I think that the important stuff is getting passed over. Specifically, current estimates say that there are about ten billion objects over one mile across in the belt.
My, that's an *awful* lot of real estate.
So, what exactly does that mean? To me it means lots of elbow room.
In the past few years I've increasingly suspected that, barring the invention of a practical warp drive, the real advance of humanity will be:
* Earth
*-Earth and near-Earth orbit
* * *Earth-Moon system with small, Antarctica-type settlements on/around Mars and Venus
* * * - Earth, Mars, and Venus Systems with Asteroid belt as the Outback
* * * * * () () Discrete civilizations in regions of Near-sun, Venus-to-Mars, each of the gas giants, off the orbital plane, and Kuiper Belt.
Who will do it?
The more I find out, the more I suspect that first the Asteroid Belt and then the Kuiper Belt will each be settled much the way the religious utopians settled the American West. In other words, forget this NASA To The Stars bullshit. Forget even the Big Corporation Takes Over Everything model. Governments can't get their act together and corporations will not see a profit justification. The real settlers will be those strongly motivated to get away from the rest of society and organized enough, well capitalized enough, and with enough umph (that's a technical term) from some charismatic leader to keep them from getting distracted or settling for easier targets.
Two kinds of folk will *really* settle non-planetary space. Small groups of genius-loners, and whatever the equivalent will be of the mid-1800's Mormons. Because only they will have the will, the means, and be up for handling the hardship. The first to give up the comforts of "civilization" are those who are least comfortable in it.
But. . .
Of course, the big x-factor in all of this is power generation. Because for now, bottom line, all of our energy but nuclear plants is solar powered. If fission reactors as we know them continue to be a condition of living without sun, then it may well be more practical to travel to another solar system. I'm betting that a way will be found.
What will they do?
So, if we pull that off, then tunnel out the inside of a rock and give it light and heat it up. Once it's hot it should stay that way if fifty or a hundred feet of rock is left as insulation. And we certainly know of plenty of ways to insulate otherwise. I suspect that making foamed rock in space won't be too big a deal. Even foamed rock with a shiny, reflective surface. Making O'Neill type colonies within asteroids should be the natural way to go.
Here's the plan. Choose a rock, send out plenty of robots to drill out the center or at least chambers in the center. Maybe even allow them fifty or a hundred years to finish the job. Give the robots the plans to melt in "piping" and chambers for atmosphere compression and expansion, greenhouses, utility rooms separate from the rest, landing areas, surface structures built from the "waste" rock, and one really big room in the center. Let's say a central chamber three miles by two by two.
Other robots are collecting the water and any organics they can, starting an atmosphere, seeding it with basic microorganisms and a few very hardy plants and animals which will happily terraform their surroundings, creating soil and the like. Ideally the animals and plants are designed to only survive in, say, less than one half atmosphere of pressure, insuring a big safe buffer zone between their turf and ours.
If you really want to get cute, a third species of robots is collecting salable raw materials like gold or even making finished goods and periodically sending shipments back to help fund the whole venture. Again, remember, it may be just fine to have a shipment take ten years to arrive so low-power things like ion engines running on thrifty trajectories are not a problem.
Let's say our group starts this plan in year X, and sends the first robots in X+2. The robots take their time but even so, there should be basic bunks and habitation ready by X+10, a period that is routinely accepted by real estate projects. By X+20 there are perhaps two hundred people living there and creating all the essentials of a living community from bookstores to bars to local jokes and slang.
Now if we allow this project to incorporate a cluster of such conversions (taking as our community model groups like the Ecovillage people, who build first one unit and then allow a local sort of ongoing mitosis) then by X+30 there might be a cluster of habitats, with, say, five hollow worldlets and two dense-packed, aircraft carrier-type structures, and a total of a hundred thousand people.
Putting it in perspective
It seems to me that this whole thing is viable technologically, sociologically, economically, esthetically, and even in terms of being salable and manageable. Keep in mind that no aspect of this but the distances involved is a large as those of a spec housing development is now. If fuel use can be brought *way* down (taking us back to solar sails or ion engines with photovoltaics and using extremely slow flight paths) and the materials are mostly already out of the gravity well, then we're talking less in materials of almost every sort then must be gathered now to create a large casino complex or remote military base.
Our government built entire cities in the mountains of Laos during the Indochina wars with fifties and sixties technologies and they did it in contested territory, building everything from supermarkets to movie theaters to houses. I am not convinced that the plan above is undoable.
So, how much room is out there anyway?
Hmmm. Lessee. Assume that the objects are spherical (thereby a gross underestimation) with a diameter of one mile. r of 0.5, rsquared of 0.25, times 4, times pi, gives us a surface area of about 3.1. Given the roughness of the surface and that we're dealing with greater than one mile, then even if we skim off one hundred feet from the top, we've got an average area of about four miles.
So the total surface area is about forty billion miles. Conservatively estimated.
Well, the Earth's surface area is about two hundred million square miles, meaning that the Kuiper belt objects have a combined surface area of about two hundred times that of the earth.
Put another way, if there were a hundred thousand projects like this one going on, they'ld be using one seven thousandth of a percent of the rock out there. This all assuming, by the way, that all rocks are equal and basically hunks of iron ore with a bit of ice.
And the finishing touch is that if one truly *did* want to send people to another solar system, then a cluster just like the one I described would be an awfully sane way to go. After all, if one chooses a cluster that is already a few decades old, then the "shake-down voyage" will be very long past and it will all have taken place within a few light-hours of Earth.
And. And. . . Go back, look again at what I've proposed. Expand the time scale, remove having humans travel out there during construction as well as the bioengineered part. If you're willing to be *very* careful about energy usage, you've now got a project that could be started today. We could realistically have the first robots in transit by 2005. Just keep sending batches as funding comes through and technology advances. At the very least it would be a hell of a way to stake a claim to some prime Kuiper real estate.
And the kicker? Add another type a robot. A propulsion bot, that just reshapes stuff into primitive engines and/or can itself be an engine. These are probably about ten years away at current rates of advancing tech. But, add some of those to the mix when they become available. Then you can have them bring the whole kit and caboodle back to earth orbit. Sure, at current tech building the propulsion and travel time would add up to about two hundred years, but the sooner we start, the sooner we're ready to leave.
And if the naysayers are right, and our economy really is heading to a collapse and we've got another little ice age on the way and the totalitarians are on the way to creating an innovation-dead worldwide police state, our descendants will know that as soon as they get their act together a whole trove of wonders will be up there waiting for them.
Conclusion
So that's what I think. Interstellar travel is a cool idea. Great for storytelling and not only fun as the dickens but deeply satisfying for all those testosterone-soaked desires to go out and conquer all that there is to see. But realistically, our position in this solar system is about the same as the position of the early humans roaming a few sections of African veldt and calling it the World. We'll be spending a long time around here and have more chances then we'll want to diverge into indescribably diverged civilizations and races long before we first awake to the sunrise of another star.
-Rustin

Who pays?

[memfree]

Between the cost of transportation and equipment (autonomous robots, seeds, etc.), your average genius my find themselves strapped for cash.

Wouldn't it be more likely that special interest groups would fund this sort of thing? Churches, for example? Militias?

I also suspect you'll need either a) bigger rocks or b) really fast, cheap and easy transports. It takes a fair amount of space/resources to sustain one human, and humans are social creatures (normally -- there are excpetions). So while three miles may feed a familiy or two, itmight not feed enough people to allow settlers adequate social interaction.

The easiest claim against this theory would be extrapolation from the recent finding that human brains interpret TV characters as 'friends' and make bonds with them. So, maybe future generations will have coping mechanisms to deal with isolation.

Re:questions

[perfessor multigeek]

You've got some good points there. But I think I've got some good responses.

Between the cost of transportation and equipment (autonomous robots, seeds, etc.), your average genius my [sic] find themselves strapped for cash.
Well, first of all, we live in the beginning of the post-Mindstorms [lego.com] age. The only thing about those robots that I don't see getting very cheap these days is cutting means. Everything else (propulsion, electronics, power storage (which is much cheaper in vacuum at about absolute zero), sensors) is getting real cheap, real fast. So we may be talking about two or three hundred robots for one homesteading family but those robots may only cost $200 dollars each. In other words, we're talking about the equivalent of half a million dollars for an extended family group. Certainly no more in constant dollars than many homesteading families paid to settle the American West. And less than many yuppies are paying today for two-bedroom apartments in San Fran or New York.

Wouldn't it be more likely that special interest groups would fund this sort of thing? Churches, for example? Militias? Well, I believe that I said just that. I did mention or allude just to the Mormons three times. I think that we're on the same page here. If, that is, we stick to religious groups and define those broadly. I think that a discussion of the structure and definition of militias will have to wait for another time.

. . .So while three miles may feed a familiy or two . . .
On the needed volume and resources front, if you check into the current state of the art in permaculture (heterogeneous interwoven plantings and fauna designed to optimize synergies and allow considerable recycling of "waste") you'll find that in fact hundreds, if not thousands could live very enjoyably indeed off the food that could be grown in a semi-settled six or seven square miles of controlled-climate land.
For a tiny example, check out what bellus quies is growing in her mini-garden. Do a thought experiment; figure that you take the inside of the average two-car garage and fit it out with gro-lights, twenty inches of soil, a solid population of ladybugs, ants, and the other basic natural housekeepers. Put, say, five hundred dollars worth of percolation tubing and controllers in with it and a *teensy* bit of fertilizer in the water. Add some bean vines for nitrogen fixing (I'm a snowpea boy myself but I leave it up to you) and a few dwarf fruit trees (mature so that they are already bearing). If you want, you can add some root crops like carrots and/or parsnips and remember that the greens from them are also food. Spread B.Q.'s seed mix liberally around (forget rows, just mix 'em up and put 'em everywhere) and start pulling and eating some of them them as soon as they are two inches tall. Remember, the entire plant is edible, so yo're not weeding, you're munching.
With all of this in place you should be pulling between two and *five* crops a year, depending on which plant.
Now this case would require adding grain and more protein from another source (I have answers for that but they're complicated) but other then that, just that garage is now providing much of the diet for, what, six people? IN A FRICKIN' TWO_CAR GARAGE!!!!!

As for interaction, well, again, look at the American West. Or look at the small groups of Polynesians who would settle a new island hundreds of miles from their home and be isolated there, sometimes for decades. Add to that the admittedly time-delayed high bandwidth interaction that may (I see no limits on technology, only on possible desire to stay low profile) be possible. In other words, "video" messages with 3D images at a resolution of perhaps 50K pixels by 200K pixels, sound beyond our ability to distinguish from reality with perhaps the equivalent of ten channels, and probably some limited spacial and or other sensory cues. And, oh, by the way, the round trip transit time would be under a day. No worse then many people's email routines now. Vastly superior to the mail delays with which people did just fine for millennia.
Given that for centuries sailors and occasionally soldiers routinely lived alone with each other for months and with only minimal contact with others like them for years at a time and I don't see the problem here. And frankly, given recent advances in things like biofeedback (don't you scoff at me, boy! the navy gets it, as do doctors and many others) and psychology in general and this whole "oh dear, they'ld just wilt away of loneliness and die" thing sounds to me like the people who used to say that the human mind would tear itself apart if we ever traveled faster than fifteen or twenty miles an hour.

All in all, the systems I talked about in my JE were mostly those that would be used by a large group. I think that I have now given a *little* bit of a sense of how smaller groups would do it. But if you just stop and look at the whole thing from the perspective of how we have lived in this past, post-frontier century and instead go by the standards of things that people have done on a repeating basis for thousands of years along frontiers, then none of this looks like a big deal to me.
Or rather, it is a big deal, but only in the way that making a Steven Seagal movie is a big deal. Complicated, expensive, but not radical or edgy. We aren't talking about quantum advances in technology or anything else. Just difficult and expensive variations on things that will by then have been done thousands of times. And, as I have pointed out, much of this can be started now.

If you still don't believe me, then sit down three graduate students from any decent robotics program (personally I would choose my old fellows at Carnegie-Mellon, but I'm not particular) and show this set of tasks to each of them. I think that it's safe to say that at least two of them would agree that there aren't any fundamental leaps here. Just more effective versions of systems that we're building now.
Take care, be well
Rustin

apology to memfree

[perfessor multigeek]

Hey there. Going back and rereading my comments I saw that one could be misunderstood. The "(boy, don't you . . ." was not meant personally, just an ill-chosen bit of emphasis. Sorry about that.
Someday I'll get this ASCII discussion thing down better; I still seem to assume that people are familiar enough with me to catch which phrasings are tongue-in-cheek.

remarks

[guybarr]

Two kinds of folk will *really* settle non-planetary space. Small groups of genius-loners,

transoprtation and R&D costs. Doesn't strike me as likely in the short future.

and whatever the equivalent will be of the mid-1800's Mormons. Because only they will have the will, the means, and be up for handling the hardship. The first to give up the comforts of "civilization" are those who are least comfortable in it.

You forget the security aspect. Space is much more dangeraous for hunted minorities.

Of course, the big x-factor in all of this is power generation. Because for now, bottom line, all of our energy but nuclear plants is solar powered. If fission reactors as we know them continue to be a condition of living without sun, then it may well be more practical to travel to another solar system. I'm betting that a way will be found.

are you talking about interplanetary or interstellar space ? Because solar power is really all you need for the following centuries in the Solar system. There's no problem of energy shortage near, say, Saturn: just build a hundred-times larger mirror ...

So, if we pull that off, then tunnel out the inside of a rock and give it light and heat it up. Once it's hot it should stay that way if fifty or a hundred feet of rock is left as insulation. And we certainly know of plenty of ways to insulate otherwise. I suspect that making foamed rock in space won't be too big a deal. Even foamed rock with a shiny, reflective surface. Making O'Neill type colonies within asteroids should be the natural way to go.
Here's the plan.

why ? why not mine the rocks and construct colonies at the shape of your choice ? (torus, probably) remember, in interplanetary space, there is never a shortage of (solar) energy, so manipulation of materials is much cheaper than the materials themselves. mining the rocks and rebuilding with custom-made (harder, lighter, more flexible) composite materials makes much more sense.

Other robots are collecting the water and any organics they can, starting an atmosphere, seeding it with basic microorganisms and a few very hardy plants and animals which will happily terraform their surroundings, creating soil and the like. Ideally the animals and plants are designed to only survive in, say, less than one half atmosphere of pressure, insuring a big safe buffer zone between their turf and ours.
If you really want to get cute, a third species of robots is collecting salable raw materials like gold or even making finished goods and periodically sending shipments back to help fund the whole venture.

again, you are thinking of terraforming. This is a mistake: there is no need to do all kinds of complicated stuff (by remote control with days or weeks of time gaps ...) at the kuiper belt; just send a robot which will cover the asteroid, or pieces of it, which a thermal blanket (you don't want volatile materials to evaporate ...), and use ion-engines (far away) and light sails (close enough) to drag the resources to inner-solar-system orbit.
Then do all the complicated stuff with your people close by, for supervision, debugging, and implementation of new ideas.
Don't send a mission of robots to the unknown with a complicated mission ... take the simplest steps that far away.


Conclusion
So that's what I think. Interstellar travel is a cool idea. Great for storytelling and not only fun as the dickens but deeply satisfying for all those testosterone-soaked desires to go out and conquer all that there is to see. But realistically, our position in this solar system is about the same as the position of the early humans roaming a few sections of African veldt and calling it the World. We'll be spending a long time around here and have more chances then we'll want to diverge into indescribably diverged civilizations and races long before we first awake to the sunrise of another star.


Yeah, but you try to fly before we crawl ... let's create an inner-solar system society first, they will do the next steps much better then us.

Re:remarks

[perfessor multigeek]

Hm. Well . . .
transoprtation [sic] and R&D costs. Doesn't strike me as likely in the short future.
As I commented in my response to memfree, the detailed overview in my initial JE was of how the large group approach could work. I apologize for my ambiguity there.
As far as the loners go, frankly, I think the biggest thing the loners will have in common is how incomprehensively divergent most of them will be from each other and certainly from mainstream society. And, also frankly, quite a few of them will die trying, just as many of the radical loners with freaky ideas did all over the American frontier.

You forget the security aspect. Space is much more dangeraous[sic] for hunted minorities.
Really? Why?

are you talking about interplanetary or interstellar space ? Because solar power is really all you need for the following centuries in the Solar system. There's no problem of energy shortage near, say, Saturn: just build a hundred-times larger mirror ...
Uhhh, first of all, didn't I start by saying that I was talking about the Kuiper Belt, which is a hell of a lot further (on average, let alone at furthest point) then the orbit of Saturn?
As for "just build a hundred-times bigger mirror", at what point would you concede that the investment exceeds the gain? Two thousand square miles to support one person? Five? Inverse squares are a bitch and out in the regions I'm talking about the Sun (as so many keep pointing out) isn't much more than another star. While in theory you could probably bloody well jump start a fusion reaction with a mirror in Earth orbit pointing towards the Magellanic Clouds, I wouldn't consider it a viable power source.
If you still disagree then I suggest that you sit down and work out how big a mirror would have to be if it was pointed towards a 75% efficient (I'm trying to skew the results way in your favor) generator such that when placed in the Kuiper Belt (you can even put it at the inner edge) it would generate 2500 VA(volt-amps) of power, which I think is a safe number for power consumption by a family group of, say, seven. Show me the math and then we'll chat.

why not mine the rocks and construct colonies at[sic] the shape of your choice ? (torus, probably) remember, in interplanetary space, there is never a shortage of (solar) energy, so manipulation of materials is much cheaper than the materials themselves. mining the rocks and rebuilding with custom-made (harder, lighter, more flexible) composite materials makes much more sense.
Okay, I've already addressed the "there is no shortage of solar energy" thing above so let's move on to "rebuilding". First of all, I *do* go into the limited melting and reforming of materials in several places (most notably with the implementing of extra insulation), but again we come down to efficiency. Space is big. But the rocks are plenty big too. If just melting out a tunnel gives you a perfectly usable space, then why start all over again? I don't know about you, but the engineering world I'm familiar with avoids complex tech to do simple jobs even more then it does national politics.
Keep in mind that, as I have pointed out, once you've got the thing up and running, you can do anything you want with it. Note my comments about "aircraft carrier" type structures, which, if you've ever been in an aircraft carrier, are about the most synthetic world you'll ever spend time in. But my point is that you can be up and running far sooner then a full scratch-build would take.
These days one of the hot things in construction is something called "design-build", which means starting to build before you've finalized the plans. And let me tell you that this kind of thing is *nasty* to manage if the politics go bad (feel free to jump in at any time, B.Q.) and none too simple at the best of times. In most cases, it's seriously bad mojo to take on huge complex projects of the sort you're talking about without first finishing the foundation work and ideally getting plenty of field experience. If you're going to build a hotel in the mountains, first you make damn sure that the construction crew will have somewhere to sleep and eat while they build it.
To me the idea of "first we do all the work of building from scratch and only then do we have a habitable place" seems sloppy and wasteful. Far better to build the equivalent of a small town first and *then* talk about Niven-esque synthetic worldlets.
On a different note, what's so bad about still having rock? Most people are far happier living in a world that has some analog aspects. I certainly am. The people who come closest to living like this now (Australians in opal territory, people living in earth-berm houses, etc.) are quite emphatic that the *last* thing they wanted was to clone the conventional world of absolute right angles and entirely human-created materials.

again, you are thinking of terraforming. This is a mistake: there is no need to do all kinds of complicated stuff (by remote control with days or weeks of time gaps ...) at the kuiper belt; just send a robot which will cover the asteroid, or pieces of it, which a thermal blanket (you don't want volatile materials to evaporate ...), and use ion-engines (far away) and light sails (close enough) to drag the resources to inner-solar-system orbit.
Then do all the complicated stuff with your people close by, for supervision, debugging, and implementation of new ideas.
Don't send a mission of robots to the unknown with a complicated mission ... take the simplest steps that far away. Hmm. Okay, first of all, who said remote control and what time gaps? The timeline I drew up has a limited and growing crew on site for the complex stuff. Anything done in the early stages would be done by autonomous robots following algorithms, not commands. Secondly, my point (if we're talking about the case of bringing the stuff in close which I only discuss as a sideline) was that you can get the work started in transit. This isn't an either/or thing it's a both thing. Do you *really* think that there is nothing significant that robots can do without direct human supervision in a project like this? What is it about dropping seed organisms into such a created environment that is such a big deal and so fixable by human intervention?
Another factor is expense. How much time and energy (which, again is most certainly not unlimited or "free" in the outer solar system) would you use up getting the materials to earth orbit? What else could you have done with that energy and time? Opportunity cost and critical path are both lookin' pretty bad with the bring-rocks-to-earth approach.
Also, keep in mind, my fundamental point was about SETTLING THE KUIPER BELT AND LIVING THERE. Not just using it as another place to strip mine and abandon. In most of the cases I discuss the resulting structures would *never* enter the inner solar system. Not to mention that the whole starting assumption was that this would be done by people who wanted to get as far from society as they can, as fast as they can.

you try to fly before we crawl ... let's create an inner-solar system society first, they will do the next steps much better then us.
Well, first of all, why wait? I, personally do not live my life waiting until something is at it's easiest; I wait only until the cost and risk are justified by the likely gain. That's kinda what capitalism is about. Diverse baskets of goods and all that.
Secondly, didn't I start with a timeline that explicitly discussed that the movement out from earth would involve several gradual and massive steps of inner-system settlement before Kuiper Belt settlement would really (heh, heh) take off?
My points were that a.) the equation is almost there now for a very small-scale implementation and b.) the equation to do this on a large scale looks to me to be getting clearer faster than warp drive-dependant approaches. In other words, this is possible (in a very modest way) very soon, and very likely on its own later.

Rustin