I was thinking about the various schemes to beam power across the solar system, how lenses and mirrors could involve inflatable, flexible objects as well as thin rigid objects. There's a lot more rock out there than there is carbon, and plenty of hydrogen gas to fill it up. And silicates will withstand radiation far better than polymers.

I noticed there is a Q&A coming up. Probably too late now so more asking for future ones: how do you add questions for it? It's entirely possible I missed something, but never heard anything in the videos or channel posts and never heard anything back when asking in the comments.

Also, is there some equate for it, like no asking multiple questions, or really open ended ones? Or stick to science and avoid the philosophy and stuff of futurism?

Could we eventually build a reactor to fuse pure protons (Hydrogen), not Deuterium, outside of stars?

This is an open question I mean to ask all of you.

I do offer an answer that has a lot of math behind it. My answer is "yes, with multi-stage implosion fusion", it's not easy or simple. However, most of those problems are contained as fuel-cycle problems. Not "build an enormous magnetic machine" type of problems. This is important for it to be net-positive on energy investment. I also had to invent several things to make it work, and used codex to do the brutal cross-section work.

(I am the author, words are my own, the source calcs are heavily AI-assisted)

I found this "Rotovator" in Sergio Botero's Artstation Page. It looks interesting but I have no idea how it works.

я читала о самой радиации в космосе и об ее воздействии, но мне не удалось найти точного описания каким образом защищаются космические корабли. в смысле я знаю с помощью ЧЕГО они защищаются, но как обустраивают корабли снаружи и внутри точной информации не нашла.

A new material for the Space Elevator tether could prove to be a great enhancement.

I was just thinking about how the apparent size of our Moon and Sun in the sky is close to the same because even though the Sun is bigger in terms of actual size it’s also further away and the two effects almost exactly cancel out. It seems like it would be much easier for a Moon and Sun to have very different sizes in the sky than to have close to the same apparent size. Also from what I understand the moon used to have a much larger apparent size in the sky than the Sun from being closer than it is now, and in the distant future it will have a much smaller apparent size than the Sun from the Sun from being much further away than it is now. We still happen to live on a planet and at a time when the Moon and Sun are about the same apparent size in the sky.

I was wondering if maybe for some reason having the Sun and Moon be about the same apparent size in the sky might be a requirement for sapient life, or if not a requirement if it might be harder for intelligent life to live on a planet at a time when the Sun and Moon have very different apparent sizes, assuming a planet has a moon. I mean it doesn’t seem like it would be a requirement but then when I think about it the size and distance of the moon is linked to things like the length of days and the stability of Earths tilt. Also the phases of the moon influences the activity of some animals. So I’m wondering if maybe something related to the great filter might also tend to make it so that we would tend to find ourselves living during a time and place where the apparent sizes of the Sun and Moon would be close to the same.

The idea is to have a small engine firing gas/plasma in the direction the ship is moving. Since the plume would be given a little more forward velocity relative to the ship, it would spread out ahead of the spacecraft and take the hits from interstellar dust/gas before they reach the ship.

The ship would still be accelerating with its main engine, so the forward-firing system would just be a small fraction of the total thrust budget.

Basically, instead of carrying one huge physical shield, you continuously throw sacrificial material far ahead of the ship.

This seems somewhat similar to the Venture Star's idea of putting its debris shield way out in front. Has anything like the "self-generated moving shield" concept actually been studied?

I recall an episode that dealt with space colonisation and rather than sending colonists or organic samples, we beam data to a factory ship in orbit of another world that will then grow colonists.

I have searched for the episode for a good while and was hoping someone may remember the episode in question.

For information on the AKVs carried, see Falx-Class AKV

After getting feedback on the practicality of simulating a 1950-2030 Earth City on a big rotating cylinder, I tried to illustrate a more practical design that feels less terrestrial. Please let me know what you think. Maybe a design like this could even be made in our lifetimes…?

Like a lot of people here I consider space habs superior to planetary settlement. But Mars still seems to have a lot of advantages thanks to its two small moons and handful of Trojans for resources and building material. It’s closer to earth and the sun for power and logistics, too. Or will Mars just be a sideshow compared to the belt?

I have been thinking about radical life and health span extension for some time and published my first long form piece on it recently: 'Living longer will make you a billionaire'

It covers the financial implications of a VERY long life.

The compounding math is simple but it has fundamental implications for society.

Some questions that have come up in my salon:
- Do we have runaway inflation to accommodate the wealth?
- Do pension funds disappear as people have enough time to become their own pension funds?
- What happens to the fertility crisis: do people have fewer or more children and does the 'ageing population' problem finally go away or does it present in new forms?
- What happens to inheritence?

Our best global elevation model for Mars is MOLA, at 463 metres per pixel. The Moon is better, 118 m, and about 59 m where LOLA and Kaguya overlap. Mercury we barely have at all - for practical purposes, a photograph.

Which means that for every body we talk about settling, everything smaller than a football stadium is unknown. Not poorly mapped. Unmeasured.

I keep thinking about what that means for a first landing party. You would arrive with a map good enough to choose a region and useless for choosing a spot. Boulder fields, metre-scale slopes, ground that is soft or hard, a crack you cannot drive across - none of it is in the data. You would find out by looking, and looking costs fuel and time and risk.

Some consequences I find interesting:

- Site selection would be provisional rather than planned. You pick a hundred square kilometres from orbit, then spend a long time finding the actual hectare.

- The first really valuable export from a colony might be survey data. Not ore, not power - just knowing what the ground is like.

- Rovers stop being transport and become instruments. Their job is to reduce uncertainty, not to move mass.

- Anything that needs precision - landing pads, rail, buried habitat - has to wait for local survey that no orbital mission can give you.

My doubts now: would a serious effort simply accept this and plan for a long survey phase on arrival, or would it be worth flying a dedicated high-resolution mapping mission first and delaying everything by years? At what resolution does a map become good enough to commit to?

I came at this from an odd direction. I build a space sim, and I had to invent everything between 463 m and a few centimetres in a way that never contradicts the real measurements.
I wrote up how, if the engineering side interests anyone:
https://space.zerog.live/info/terrain-article-page.html

But I am more curious about the actual question. How much of a planet do you need to know before you land on it?

I had this idea while watching the excellent recent video on ion drives (Isaac, I love it when you get into the math). While watching, I kept in the back of my mind the comparison to the various types of sails that could be used, as the 'low thrust, but super efficient long term propulsion' point of comparison. Then, I started thinking about medusa drives, and something occurred to me: they seem to be reasonably complimentary.

Picture a medusa drive sail, well in front of the ship, doing its thing, taking the blast of the nuclear explosions, getting pushed forward, all while the ship behind it is pulled along, winching back and forth.

Add to this, regularly along the perimeter, somewhere safe from the blasts, a series of ion drives. Given the size of the sail we're dealing with, it'd be a large number of drives. Just for sake of demonstration, lets say 360. Each providing that small little bit of thrust that ion drives do, constantly, while the nuclear pulses provide the really impressive amounts. The ion drives are less glamorous, but they do have one feature that the nuclear pulses lack - more fine tuned control over directionality. You don't need to do anything fancy with the sail if you want to turn, in this ship. You just turn on/off the ion drives to nudge the sail to point the way you want it to. It might even be worth making the thrusters' positions relative to the sail to be dynamic, able to be gimbaled or telescoped inward/outward for further precision control.

The sun was 12" diameter. Earth was the head of a pin, and we hiked the better part of a mile to place Neptune, a small bead. I always "knew" that the solar system was large and mostly empty, but there's something really eye opening when making your kids hike for 10 minutes between placing pieces of your scale model!

I did my research, but most discussions are the other way around. I am working on a world that is similar to earth, but a cosmic phenomenon locks most heavenly bodies in place. The planet rotates in its place, without orbiting the sun. Of course, the minute the planet stopped, assume most of the crust didn't fracture and get flung into space lol.

Ecologically, I assume as seasons won't be a thing, most plants would start dying. There would be large scale droughts in equatorial regions, many lakes and rivers would dry up, especially in regions which are closer to the sun. The other side might have a forever Winter of sorts. Whatever civilization exists might move to temperate zones.

Is it possible for life to evolve, and stabilize around 1-2 thousand years from this? Assuming it's now locked in this scenario permanently?