/dumbsci/

>Suck all the water out of it
This part's the problem. The pressure on the walls at the bottom will be absolutely fucking insane. And one breach, no matter how small will propagate at close to whatever the speed of sound is in your building material. So the tiniest defect or damage will cause the loss of the entire structure.

The basic concept is sound, but there are a lot of small technical problems.

First of all, the minimum weight of a 100% self sustaining ecosystem is unknown, but probably high. A bunch of people have tried on earth and ended up with a large amount of shenanigans.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2

Balloon rocket launches are something that people have been talking about for a while. It would save the energy needed to get the rocket up to altitude and through the atmosphere. The problem is, it takes a fairly large volume of helium to lift a relatively small amount of anything else. You'd be talking like city sized helium containers to lift anything capable of achieving orbital velocity, and you'd have to maneuver the thing through the relatively turbulent atmosphere, when it has an enormous surface area.

The main problem is doctrine. The asteroid belt is maybe two years at the max, so a totally self sustaining ecosystem might be overkill. The nearest star is thousands of years away by conventional rockets, so you'd have to either go nuclear (do it faggot) or build a generation ship. If you do the latter, you have to have at least 200 breeding pairs of humans, and even that's pushing the limits of fatal inbreeding.

There isn't that much stuff worth colonizing in between the asteroid belt and exoplanets.

I guess Europa would be cool to visit, but that sounds like a one time research thing.

>thing will get destroyed if thing is faulty

Thanks for the input, Sherlock. Were you the one who told us that if a crack happens in a rocket booster tank it will explode?

Why don't we try building a planet relatively close to the earth but far enough away that it doesn't interfere with the moon's functions? Or better yet, simply colonize the moon and build moon bases under it's surface? That seems pretty plausible.

As for the making a planet idea, it was more of capture a small asteroid with enough space to support a town and adding dirt or a relatively metal plating to it, and building out with layers of housing complexes all around the asteroid. Of course a closed teraforming system would have to be used though.

Basically

>what advantage would this have over living on earth
>what would it do that would pay for the cost of engineering it

Why not just use tunnels for the bulk of any settlements on Mars?

>protects from radiation
>naturally occurring material
>rock will contain the pressure of the air
>pressure of the air will help to stabilize rock

The self sustaining ecosystem was more of an assurance so you wouldn't constantly need to go back for supplies and could act as a secondary environment if there is ever a case in which animals should be removed from earth.

As for the helium, I suppose regular hot air or ammonia might be more viable for buoyancy.

As for the asteroids and exoplanets, their might be resources of value that could be mined from them.

I suppose there wouldn't be much of an advantage aside from taking the first steps off of earth in terms of colonization and maybe a pit stop but it would be a true test of human capabilities and could be the foundations of human building whole planets if the need or desire ever arises.

We shouldn't send just one random ship into the abyss of space. We should have a space community out there otherwise it's just a one-way kamikaze trip.
Even if everything went perfectly you'd run out of fuel eventually or get hit by an asteroid and you'd be way too far away for help.

We could have colonies on other planets/asteroids etc or orbiting around them. Or even around Earth, like a much bigger ISS.

Everything needs to be improved. Ability to travel reliably to/trough space (doesn't even need to be that fast, space suit tech, life support systems, ability to harvest resources away from Earth, ability to transport resources through space etc.

Well, the problem I'm seeing is like

>self sustained ecosystem is overkill for 2-5 year jaunts
>self sustained ecosystem is inadequate for 50+ year voyages

I guess we don't really know since we haven't really seen how much we can miniaturize your environment. It might be really good for Mars missions.

Actually, an asteroid might make a good generational ship if we teraformed it well.

What people have been talking about is establishing colonies on the moon and Mars as way-stations between the Earth and the big asteroid belts.

If you could build like celestial gas stations/air traffic control centers/cell phone towers, that would be a cool job, and might actually be a profitable reason to inhabit other planets.

Well the fuel would be stars themselves or at least solar power, that was what I meant by mirroring the earth's essential processes, though asteroids would be one of the worst problems.

That's not that dumb, and that idea has been analyzed and shown that in addition to storing energy you could use the same setup to desalinate water. The pressures that are optimal for storing electricity are the same as those required by reverse osmosis

If we had a solid grasp on gravity and air control, this definitely could work out nicely. For air control, the most efficient means of production would be algae but for gravity, could you use the right magnetic field to get the desired result?

>colonies on the moon and Mars

You've got to admit, the whole reason this process is going slowly is because there's not a lot of people working on branching outside of the earth. If businesses saw a viable reason to seek something outside of earth, we would probably be entering into the space age relatively quickly.

I don't know about magnets.

I know there are magnets that can push non-magnetic objects, but it seems like it would be like living inside an MRE machine.

I was thinking for really long term voyages you could try either constant 1g acceleration, or having two segments of the spacecraft with roughly equal weight so you could spin them around each other like a binary star system and use the centripetal force as artificial gravity.

The binary star systems seems good although I wonder if it would be as smooth as the 1g acceleration implies.

1g acceleration is a different thing altogether.

The logic is simple.

>accelerate 1g halfway to the destination
>turn around
>decelerate at 1g for the remaining half

The problem being that that is a very very large amount of Delta V.

You can make a string instrument with tight metal wires. The first magnetic tape players were actually using metal wire instead of tape. I feel like I should be able to combine these two things into one musical instrument. Tape loops like what the Beatles used for Tomorrow Never Knows, but the tapes are wires you can also pluck like a harp.

So an electric guitar?

Doesn't touching the wire all the time mess with the magnetization?
What exactly do you have in mind? You play something and then you can play it back?

>Doesn't touching the wire all the time mess with the magnetization?
I don't think so.

> You play something and then you can play it back?
Something a bit like record scratching where you have recorded sounds but cause distortions in real time. Audio recorded on magnetically metal wire then read back while the wire is vibrating. Might make an interesting sound.

i guess turn the spinner things by hand while it's running and/or install a small electromagnet you can control
you might just screw up the recording and it might not sound good at all
i don't think it would sound good

OH boy I have books of doodles of fantasy inventions. If I wrote down the narratives I'd probably be famous or something, But hey, I've been there

Forgot picture

>no greentext explaining the doodle
>sideways

I can't help you there.
It's a composter water heater and photobioreactor
Have another sideways doodle

This ones a graph of my half ass account of semiosis

Build extremely low-difference sterling engines and place them on lakes and oceans to run off of the temperature difference between the air and the water.

Wtf, did the cat pee on it?

If you draw an invention, and the cat takes a whiz on it, then there is literally nothing worse I can say about it.

I'm guessing cheap paper, maybe alcohol spilled on it and smeared the green-blue lines?

Cool and all, but you'll need a really really big mountain. And then you're still gonna need som way of accelerating shit into orbit. There are probably easier ways of going about this, even though fundamentally it's not impossible, just extremely difficult to build.

gee whizz

maybe just get a cylinder that rotates on its own axis before you burn 5 suns worth of energy

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity

>you have to have at least 200 breeding pairs of humans, and even that's pushing the limits of fatal inbreeding.
Not really. This number is safe even just with normal breeding, but we're not limited to it. We can take a lot of sperm from many donors, or even female genetic material, not to mention genetic editing.

If you had a time machine you could minimize the divergence of the timeline you return to after traveling into the past (and then into the future relative to that past which was around the time of your present just before you traveled) by using a device to capacitate the lines of temporal flux during travel into the past, and then discharging that flux capacitor on your return trip.

>accept that public schools are basically giant methadone clinics with algebra
>"your parents signed and paid for your new lunch which includes an ounce of pot"
>high school dropout rate at an all time low, schools start to talk about skills you use for actual jobs

>dude shouldn't we like get a base going on the moon or mars
>what the fuck ever for?
>I don't know, a whole fucking moon or planet for ourselves
>a whole moon or planet worth of materials to mine
>naw dude its too far away

Why would it not be smooth? Take two capsules, or a ring, and spin it. In a vacuum, there's not much to perturb the spinning motion.
Well, if you can do 1g brachistochrones, why not? Going to Saturn, for example, now takes weeks not a decade.

Now here's a dumb physics question.

Would the spinning require constant energy inputs, or could you just start it spinning and then leave it

In a perfect world no, but any impact (possibly from a micrometeorite) would change the angular momentum so it would benefit the spinning ship to pack an extra flywheel to change spin.

Supposedly there's a minimum circumference for a centrifuge that can provide artificial gravity without making everyone sick all the time.

I was thinking that because tension members can't buckle, the best option would be to have a spacecraft that works like nun-chucks and has a kevlar cord a mile long holding them together as they spin.

aww did that hurt your butt? It's a serious flaw because it's more likely than not to happen. That's like 8 miles worth of the same engineering used to make tiny submarines that can go that deep without breaking.
Aside from that, it's a huge waste of energy just for launching something into the sky, and the ship would still have to accelerate with fossil fuel after it's in outer space to get into orbit, otherwise the tube would have to be diagonally slanted almost flat to the point of being more like 50 miles long AND the entire ship would need to be covered in heat protection that's normally only needed for reentry.

The only reasonable use I can think of for this idea is launching a heavy rock or into space to block an asteroid or something.

You'd need tunneling equipment

Bring a nuclear reactor and some TBMs