Space Forum / Space Policy / July 2008

Here is a NASA article detailing what we know about the atmosophere of
Venus and a mission planned there;

http://gltrs.grc.nasa.gov/citations/all/tm-2002-211467.html

Which inevitably led to one of the researchers who worked on the solar
airplane project proposing aerostat cities to colonize Venus

http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=APCPCS00065
4000001001193000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes

For those who do not want to join AIP or pay the $23 here is a free
source

http://spacemonitor.blogspot.com/2007/05/copy-of-pdf-file.html

Here are some other sources;

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003AIPC..654.1193L
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=548336&id=9&qs=No%3D40%26Ne%3D35%26N%3D34%2B22
%2B297%26Ns%3DArchiveName%257C0

Here is an article about the paper

http://spacemonitor.blogspot.com/2007/05/floating-city-on-venus.html

Here is an article about 'cloud nine' cities proposed by Buckminster
Fuller back in 1967, similar concept of an aerostat city for Earth;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_nine_%28Tensegrity_sphere%29
http://stevendejonckheere.blogspot.com/2006/08/cloud-nine.html
http://www.care2.com/c2c/photos/view/43/100080464/Space_shots/cloud%209.jpg.html
http://sealwyf.wikispaces.com/Cloud+Nine+Project
http://www.buckminster.info/Biblio/By/By-BkTOC-CriticalPath.htm

The difficulty with Earth based aerostats is that you have 0.03 to
0.10 kg/m3 buoyancy which is about 1% the buoyancy possible on Venus.
Buoyancy translates directly to structural mass, areal density, and
strength.

Venusian aerostat cities will be 100x more heavily built than
comparable aerostat cities on Earth.

Martha, I think you are correct in saying that aerostat cities are
easier to build than O'Neill style space colonies.  Recall where
O'Neill's ideas came from.  He *built* the vacuum chambers for CERN.
He taught the art to graduate students.  So, humanity has ALREADY
built large vacuum shells kilometers in diamter, tens of kilometers in
size, to house their large particle accelerators.  So, while it may
seem incredible, we ALREADY have experience in this sort of thing.
Aerostat cities don't have to be absolutely air tight the way space
cities have to be, so they'll be easier to build and operate.
Nevertheless, we ALREADY know how to do these things.  The only thing
we lack is an efficient way to get the materials to where they're
needed.  The method of building 1,000 or so ICF nuclear pulse
spacecraft to haul 20,000 tons around the inner solar system, and
capture appropriately sized compositioned and located asteroidal
fragments to bring into a 'terminus' orbit around planets we intend to
colonize will work.  I have calculated elsewhere that the cost will
initially be $91 per metric ton (less than a penny a kg) and will drop
to about $0.14 per metric ton - if we stick with boron.  About 1
million tons of boron are produced on Earth presently.  Borane - a
composition of two boron and 2 hydrogen atoms - with the appropriate
isotope, costs $7 million per ton.  Each ton can return between 1.5
million tons growing to 6.0 million tons to a target planet.

To move Earth's industry to orbit, and expand consumption on Earth to
match present US per capita rates in terms of food, fiber, metals,
etc., requires approximately 28 billion tons per year of raw materials
be delivered to Earth orbit, and then deorbited directly to consumers
on demand.  The use of telerobotics will provide everyone with jobs to
achieve this.   The time frame it takes to set the system up about 7
years.  The time frame it takes to fully populate it, 14 years - with
the last thing being developed, space forests.

Once the techniques are well established on Earth, they may be
exported to other worlds that are being colonized.  Seeds, tooling,
key personnel come from Earth, raw materials come from the asteroid
belt and the Kuiper belt.

At some point, experts like Hans Moravec, Kurzweil, and others, feel
that by 2040 we will reach the 'technological singularity' which will
allow human level AI to emerge.  At this point, the teleoperated
robots will displace humans in all economic functions.  At that point
we must adopt a philosophy that recognizes the value of human beings
independently of their economic cost or utility.  Otherwise, the
machines will follow the logic of any philosophy they are programmed
with - and the consequences would be dramatic for humans.

My goal is to have an industrial outer-belt orbiting the terminus of
Earth by 2025-30 time frame, and begin moving toward a more civilized
approach.  Assuming the experts are right, and we have displaced human
intelligence with AI in all economic activity by 2045 we have about 15
to 20 years of solid economic growth to enrich the 3.3 billion
unemployed and 2.1 billion underemployed with IRAs sufficient to
provide non-labor income adequate to their needs - if we wish to avoid
difficulties caused by widespread adoption by AI.  The widespread use
of tele-operated humaniform robots combined with a universal financial
system based upon the successes of our current global financial
infrastructure is one sociologically viable pathway to side-stepping
problems in this arena.  This requires that we move immediately to
develop off-world assets and resources to improve conditions on Earth.

I do not know what Venus would have to offer interplanetary industry.
Perhaps it will become the repository of visionaries who seek to
transform the planet in 100 or 1,000 years, and seek to have the
perfect society ready for that eventuality.  Perhaps the fact that it
has nothing to offer today, but will one day be an ideal Earth, would
make it unique.  A backwater where people have space and time and
peace to reflect on things and take time to do things perfectly.

Mercury has energy and metals.  The asteroid belt, metals and
volatiles.  The Kuiper belt, volatiles and metals.   The gas giants,
gases.  We will certainly efficiently use the resources around us.
This does not mean that in the future our activities will be dominated
by the need to develop resources.  If you've ever visited Hawaii, or
Tahiti, you'll know what I mean.

Jupiter's gravity make it difficult to imagine humans living there in
large numbers.  Robots of course would have no problems.  Humans in
buoyancy tanks less of a problem.  Humans surrounded by 'man
multipliers' could work there - if they were fit.  Perhaps some of the
strongest people in human space might be long time workers of jovian
gas mines.

You are correct about Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.  These all of course
have a wide variety of gases, they lack abundant solar energy of
Venus, yet hydrogen occurs in large measure, sufficient to build
hydrogen fueled ICF power plants certainly.

He3 would be too valuable as a rocket propellant to waste making
energy for stationary industrial applications.

Good data on the Venusian radiation environment is hard to come by.
Here is one reference that seems both comprehensive and reliable.
Though the authors freely admit that several questions remain to be
answered.  Think Earth without a magnetosphere.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/g313874mp827x655/

CO2 is 44/14th denser than Earth's N/O atmosphere.  So, the mass above
the station at 1 bar is 44/14 times heavier.  Solar flares would be
more of a problem.   A city  or cities that hung around the poles of
the planet, and could loiter on the night side in the event of a
massive solar flare, would have the bulk of the planet to protect
them.  There's also a cosine effect as rays slant through the
atmosphere at shallow angles, providing far more sheilding than say a
city near the equator of the planet at high noon.

Given the nature of hohmann transfer orbits, asteroidal fragments
arrive tangent to the orbital motion of the destination planet.  This
makes arrival at the destination planet perfectly suited to come in
over the North pole say, and brake into a sun synchronous circlar
orbit at low altitude, above the what I call the terminus of the
planet.  That is the line separating day from night.  Gravitational
dynamics are used to cause the orbit to precess so that as the planet
orbits the sun, the plane of the orbit changes to stay above the
terminus.  Newly arriving fragments are slotted into the growing ring
by controlling the precise time of arrival - the way a great ship
enters a dock on Earth's ports.

Solar collectors in this terminus orbit are exceedingly easy to
build.  Lens systems that take laser energy from the L1 point at
Mercury and send it to L2 for distribution throughout the solar system
- are also located in this orbit.  L2 distributes energy to Mercury's
L4 and L5, which in turn send energy to L3 - again to distribute laser
energy to wherever its needed around sol.

To get to the surface of these worlds from the terminus, we build an
orbital ring inside the lowest altitude free flying ring, and build
downward.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_fountain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring

This allows the importing and exporting massive amounts of material to
and from these planetary surfaces, without having to discover
unobtainium.  I imagine the construction of orbital rings and space
fountains below the innermost 'belt' of free flying objects in the
industrial ring placed around each world.

For Venus, there would be no space fountains extending to the surface,
at least right away.  There would be rather short tethers, only 100 km
or so in length, that would discharge materials arriving from beyond
the system, and extract materials being sent beyond the system.  Prior
to the construction of such massive infrastructure objects would be
deorbited the same way they are deorbited on Earth, by aerobraking.

I envision all this being done on Earth first, with mines, smelting
plants, factories, farms, and forests being built on orbit and
distributing wealth throughout the world.  I envision the creation of
66,000 aerostat cities on orbit and them being deployed in the
stratosphere of Earth.  Each 50,000 person city would be free flying
and become refuge to the 3.3 billion unemployed people of Earth.  They
would become using telerobotics a single massive work force.  Each
person generating $200,000 per year on average, and $150,000 per year
flowing into their economic well being - including capital
infrastructure to keep them employed and productive.  $50,000 is free
cash flow to the person who organized the process.  So, with 25% of
this population employed, and another 75% dependents, this is  $165
quadrillion per year in wealth.  Each consumes $60,000 per year in the
current year, and each contributes $30,000 to their various
governments, and each contributes $60,000 per year to their investment
funds.   This gives over $40 quadrillion per year in free cash flow to
the creators of the system, and another $50 quadrillion per year in
investment capital, and another $40 quadrillion per year to operate
the system.  To the extent governments buy from the system, $20
quadrillion per year is available from that source.  By comparison $66
trillion per year is generated by humanity currently.  Of this $9
trillion per year is spent on food, $4 trillion on energy, and $3
trillion spent fighting for food and energy access.  There are 9.5
million millionaires that hold $38 trillion in liquid assets.   The
system described here can be built and achieve break-even with less
than $5 trillion.  Once breakeven is achieved, 20% per year growth
rate is possible.  All the world's people will be millionaires well
before 2045.

With most energy being used in a terminus orbit above Earth, most
powersats that power space industry will be located above this orbit
as well.  This leads to a slightly different powersat design than
powersats intended to power terrestrial arrays located in GEO.

The GEO based system will be first generation.  T-orbit systems will
be second generation.  Mercury based systems third generation.

I have written elsewhere how I am proceeding.  Harvest sunlight
arriving on Earth from deep space, and convert it to hydrogen at low
cost, and use that hydrogen to upgrade low grade carbon sources into
highly valued hydrocarbon fuels.  Sell these fuels at a discount and
expand production of hydrocarbon fuels.  I have two coal-to-liquid
programs underway now.  Each of these produces 1/4% of the world's
hydrocarbons.  These will be completed in three years.  Four years
after that I will have 42 completed.  This provides 10% of the world's
present day hydrocarbon demand, and 8% of demand in that day.  The
solar panel arrays at each coal-to-liquid facility will be augmented
by bandgap matched laser energy from GEO to increase its output 16x
over the next 4 years.  This will increase hydrocarbon output to 35%
of today's demand, 20% of demand on that day; and increase hydrogen
output to 80% of today's energy demand, and 40% of demand on that
day.  At this time 2018 -the world will be largely hydrogen driven.

The owners of this system of equipment will generate approximately $4
trillion per year - and I will be in a position to execute on the
industrial ring ideas I've related here.  As I've described elsewhere,
this will require 7 years to complete, and will be done by 2025 as
stated above.  By that time we will have cities on the moon, mars, and
colonies near dwarf planets Ceres, Juno, Pallas, aerostats on Earth
and Venus, and powersats under construction above Mercury, and
outposts across the solar system out beyond Sedna and Xena

Past the technological singularity things can get weird.   Self
replicating machine systems, human level AI, fusion power, and nano-
technology combine to create some amazing possibilities that are
rather incredible.   I have attempted to discuss them online in the
past, but they have not been well received as yet.

For example, plasmas can form a nonlinear optical system.  Nonlinear
optics can create an optical switching element.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel5/9407/29846/01361654.pdf?temp=x

that exhibit optical hysteresis.

http://www.opticsinfobase.org/viewmedia.cfm?id=929&seq=0

which can be the basis for dynamic random access memory and computing
elements

Holographic systems can precisely control phase and position of
photons across a surface, and nonlinear optical system can implement
dynamic holograms.  This may make 3d TV possible using plasma screens,
but there are other possibilities as well.

Such as making a dynamic computing platform implemented in a plasma.

Consider the following;

An ICF charge is placed in a gamma ray lasing cavity that has a
precisely made gamma ray hologram placed in front of it.  This is
housed in a satellite and sent to Jupiter.  It slingshots around
Jupiter and drops straight into the Sun.  When it gets within some
small distance of the Solar atmosphere, the ICF unit is detonated in
such a way as to create a precisely engineered optical system in the
solar atmosphere, vaporizing the satellite.  The system creates a
nonlinear optical pattern that carries out computations and re-stores
information contained in the original hologon.  Except in the plasma
environment of the sun, the computing process is powered by controlled
fusion it creates to generate additional structured gamma ray bursts
from fusion events it creates in the solar environment.  Such a
structure easily replicates itself - turning more and more of the
fusion processes in the sun toward computing.  The upper limit of this
solar computing platform is given by the Beckenstein bound for a
computer the mass and power output of the sun

http://www.springerlink.com/content/p377708242p624u2/

Which is substantial.   Laser beams and radio pulses would communicate
usefully with this platform.

One interesting thing to keep in mind is that this computing platform
is self powered, by fusion energy, and is capable of manipulating the
solar environment atom by atom using optical methods

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_molasses
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_tweezers

To do things in the sun with the massive fusion energy resources
available there.

I have looked at this in some detail and posted about it here as I've
said.  Basically, with exponential growth, doubling ever few nano-
seconds (the time it takes for structured gamma rays to create other
structured gamma rays by created a structured fusion blast similar to
the original fusion blast that set the whole thing off) the entire sun
can be brought under intelligent control in a matter of hours.

Basically, cool, highly structured jets of material can be ejected
from the sun to form.   A shell of iron, carbon, silicon, oxygen,
nitrogen, 100s of kilometers thick may be formed 477 million km above
the solar surface - creating a shell possessing 2.34 million km in
diameter.  Its surface possesses 1 gravity due to action of the sun.
The output of the sun may be reduced by a factor of 10,000 by breaking
the sun up into a ring of dozens of smaller stars - increasing the
Sun's longevity to tens of trillions of years.

Solar panels capture a portion of this energy and use it industrially
- in the body of the shell.  Lenses with optical tubes communicate
light to the outer part of the shell, and illuminate the surface using
mirrors that orbit overhead to redirect the illumination, recreating
the diurnal environment of Earth.  The surface consists of silicates
and water and an oxygen nitrogen atmosphere.   38,197 earthlike
'tiles' create the sphere.  With 68% land area and 32% water area,
land area of this structure  is  77,000x larger than Earth.   7.7
billion people inhabiting this sphere have 100,000 people sharing 100x
the resources available on Earth, and 1,000,000x the industrial
energy.

With self replicating super-intelligent AI - the wealth possible from
such a system would be larger than anyone could imagine.  Each family
would have a region the size of North America and posses an industrial
infrastructure powered underground by the fusion energy sources below,
with hundreds of millions of super-intelligent robots.

And lets not forget, the computing platform of the dozen fusion
powered star fragments.  The waste heat from their operation powers
this world.

Of course before anything was done, it would be modeled in detail by
the computing platform itself and approved by the humans orbiting
overhead.  Before anything were done on sol, we'd do it at Proxima
Centauri first, then Alpha Centauri B, and finally Alpha Centauri A.

We may elect to NEVER do this to Sol.   Yet, if experiments in Rigil
Kentaurus are successful, we can expect the center of human history to
shift to this nearby star system over time.

Using family owned 1/3 light speed laser light sail driven starships
with self-contained life support and industrial systems, - flying
ranches - to travel star to star - it takes 12 to 51 years to get to
nearby stars within 17 light years of Earth.  There are 50 stars in
this group.

If all 50 of them are converted in the manner described, and land
grants are given to settlers in a manner similar to the land runs of
the 1880s in Oklahoma.  This would provide such runs.

The nearest 5 stars can be reached in 20 years using laser light sails
traveling at 1/3 c.  This will make them popular if transformed along
the lines described if longevity research bears fruit - and other
technical problems are solved.   Stars within 51 years by light sail -
may have to await the development of successful stasis techniques
along with reliable medical robotics.

As income levels rise from subsistence, population growth rate
increases, and maxes out at $3,000 per person per year, then, as
income levels increase beyond this level, population growth rates
slow, reaching zero at about $20,000 per person per year, and drop
below zero above that.

I have proposed a method to increase average human per capita income
to $60,000 per person per year and grow it from there as we advance.
The methods described here by capturing only 50 star systems within 17
light years of Earth, provide material wealth beyond anyone's dream of
avarice.  One thing we can predict with certainty, population levels
will be less than double what they are today if this program is
followed, even if everyone has absolute control over their aging
process.  Barring ideologically driven efforts of course - using
robots to recreate every person for which we have genetic data for -
for example.

The point is, the 50 star systems will likely attract the 3.3 billion
who are presently unemployed, and their children, which will likely
number less than an additional 5.0 billion.  There are another 2.1
billion who are underemployed on Earth today, and they will likely
have another 1.5 billion over the next 50 years.  That leaves 1.2
billion fully employed folks, who will change the nature of their work
and investments as the markets change and massive increases in wealth
are captured by them.  Approximately 300 million will likely remain on
Earth, 500 million in the solar system, and 400 million joining the
bulk of the others among the nearby stars.

Looking at longevity data for the past 110 years, we can predict that
longevity will increase by more than 1 year per year by 2010 - and
that by 2040 - the technological singularity - aging and disease will
be totally under control.

What I'm saying is that among the 50 stars with lands totally 3.8
million times that of Earth, there will be fewer than 12.1 billion
people   That's fewer than 3,200 people per Earth tile.  Each
commanding trillions of human level robots with millions of times the
resources and millions of times the energy available to ALL of Earth
today.

I mentioned elsewhere that laser light sails can be adapted by
inhabitants at various star systems to form high energy accelerators
that handle large masses, the size of mountain ranges.  Iron-56
ejected from the stars themselves can be made into large populations
of black holes - black hole dusts I call them - that are spun and
charged to implement computing platforms that copy the platforms
within each star, and make them available for human use, and also
manipulate time and space in such a way that allow a wide range of
capabilities among the inhabitants of these 50 stars.  This includes
instantaneous transport among the star systems, and perhaps beyond it
by a variety of means speculated about by authors such as Kip Thorne
and Frank Tipler.

When I'm sitting here thinking about Mook's cloud cities on Venus
or his ideas for settlements on Mercury, I'm really thinking about
two different topics.

Topic 1 is what can us humans do here in Sol's planetary system?
It's more than I' d thought; it's certainly much more than our
sort-of "elected representatives" are thinking of in Washington.
Thus we have a major challenge here which has nothing whatever
to do with the mere engineering of getting those settlements out
there, but with the hard, slippery and obtuse problems of human
avarice and stupidity.  Which today are all too visibly why we do
not today have those settlements on Mars that Zubrin has been
working for.

Topic 2 is, learning about where people can live.  We seem to
have lately figured out that yes there are all those exotic
chemistries you can imagine -- life based upon interactions of
subatomic particles (Forward's neutron star life); upon silicon
(the marching pyramids in a late 1930's story by Stanley
Weinbaum) and etc; but for immediate and practical
purposes we want to think about life based upon *water*.
And that gives a Sol's system life zone ranging from about
Venus out to the Belt (with two of Jupiter's moons looking
very interesting now).

But now Mook and others are extending this life zone for
those who can apply technology: the original "life zone"
has become an "origin-of life zone" and the range within
our System where technology based life could exist is
greatly enlarged.  Thus Fermi's "If there are aliens, where
are they?" takes on even greater meaning and we are led
to the question now getting attention: "What is the "Great
Filter" and how does it work?

(Where my obvious answer is, "It's stupidity, stupid," it's
a quality of mind that is amply demonstrated right here in
Usenet.)

Titeotwawki -- mha  [2008 Jly 01]

Well, there's "word salad" and there's "word salad."  One variety of
it reflects that the reader needs to sit down and do a little mental
work; the other reflects confused randomness where it least
belongs: within a (presumably) otherwise normal human mind.

This stuff from Mook is clearly variety #1; and, it's extremely
interesting.  I hadn't thought much about cloud cities in the Venus
atmosphere, but evidently it's quite doable.  Yes, they had an
idea there in Star Wars, and it's *real* in fact, as Mook lays out
details.  And Mercury for metals?  That does seem likely; but we
then get into the matter of a whole human and business ecology
thru the solar system -- from the Belt in to Mercury and even
more close to Sol than that.  Further, not only us can do that but
so can *somebody else* orbiting another star.  Which indeed
makes it a SETI topic.

So I'd like to see this "word salad" stuff left out of the talk here,
the reader who cannot do a little mental work can demonstrate
that well enough without using stereotype terms -- and let's look
at this extremely serious business of off-Terra settlements and
at what SETI is telling us.

Titeotwawki -- mha  [sci.astro.seti  2008 Jly 01]