+Fuck you Google It would be expensive to initiate it, but once they establish robotic space development it may not cost a cent to make "Elysium" and "Death Stars" etc. That shit would be too expensive to build by humans (forget it) but once robotics are up-and-running with full automation and AI, there should be no more cost... just robotics constructing stuff (including themselves). Robotics would have to be well established and many different robots and be able to mine the asteroids etc. before they could build anything like "Elysium". And that would be the only way we could do it (and for free).
Thanks! Now, finally, we're getting serious about real-world technologies for going into space & staying there. It's about time. I've been saying for years now that we're simply not ready to go to Mars. We've been talking & talking about doing this or going there - all without getting down to specifics. Now, though, we actually have some of the necessary things in place, such as 3D printing in space, ideas for using regolith for building, & extracting minerals & gasses for processing & use. I'm glad we've finally decided to get real. Now maybe we can go back to the Moon & stay there, putting up satellites, building (or at least assembling) telescopes, & operating resource extraction & power generating units - as well as all the science that can be done. Then - maybe - I'll feel we're ready to go to Mars & do more than just say we've been there (& not go back for who knows how long - especially if it ended in tragedy, which it well might have.) Now, I'm beginning to have some confidence. Let's keep at it! Rikki Tikki.
I've actually been getting into 3D printing recently and I have to say if they can manage to make durable, printable filament out of in-situ resources, then it solves a LOT of engineering challenges in terms of being able to adapt on the fly to changing needs and conditions. In my experience, the most time is actually spent designing the object to print, with the print itself being so easy to replicate it would be trivial to replace worn out parts once you have the design for them. 3D printing in microgravity would also reduce the need for support materials and make printing in general less of a hassle then it is with gravity always threatening to make your filament sag before it has a chance to cool.
Manufacturing in space is the key. Solar furnace for smelting raw ore, solar power to extract water and gases and solar power for manufacturing. Can't wait to see what private industry comes up with
Note that it is far more likely that any resources found in space will be put to use in space first, not hauled back to Earth until we built a fast and practical and safe way to do it. Because of the tremendous cost in energy & money of launching something out of Earth’s atmosphere or back into it, the most efficient use of resources extracted in space will be right there: in space.
As I said, as long as we do not have an economical, fast and safe way to bring the materials back to Earth, it will mostly stay in space (thankfully or unfortunately). This is a nice subject that makes us dream (well in my case) and think about the past exploitation and colonization of the North and South America in a certain way. Have a great weekend! :-)
It's EASY, as well as safe and practical, to return stuff to Earth. The first few hundred tons is expensive though. One idea is build reentry gliders out of asteroidal material. Iron and silicon, basically. Crude is adequate for a start, but eventually we could make them very fancy. Materials could be landed at the receiving docks of factories, direct from space. Cheaper and easier than rail freight. Asteroidal iron will be cheaper than earth iron, delivery included. Eventually, despite delivering megatons of stuff to Earth, almost all of it will be used in space.
It's really very interesting, at the same time, don't you think that the return trip must be more profitable than the actual trips and the extraction itself. We are talking here about tons of equipment plus tons of materials confronted with gravity when they come back. Personally, the project that comes to my mind is the space elevator (the idea of Tsiolkovsky). I do not know if it could be feasible one day and I doubt the safety of such a machine, but who knows? Have a nice weekend !
Creating habitats should probably focus on building bunkers, simplest work around to the radiation is to dig and in low gravity digging is easier. A solar powered foundry for working metal would seem necessary too.
Bulldoze a trench. Drop a prefab shelter (maybe a balloon) in the trench. Cover the trench. Sorted. Or just plop the shelter on the surface and pile rocks/gravel on top. That's maybe harder to do - you need to lift the rocks higher. You need a bigger pile, so you need more rocks. The moon is sort of made of ready-mix cement. Maybe pour concrete instead. Maybe make the shelters from mooncrete too. Or literally pitch tents in a lunar lava tube. (Seems dangerous and inconvenient to me, but it's not a bad idea for early missions with minimal infrastructure.)
Makes too much since, thus why NASA will not do it and SpaceX and Blue Origin will. Start digging throw in a prefab liner and cover it with material, perhaps pump some hydrogen into the ceiling prefab just to be safe. Two men with a electric tiller and shovels could have multiple habitats up in hours.
Fraser Cain if you put your lunar igloo in the shade - like even under an umbrella - then you can make authentic igloos out of ice, or out of ice-crete (iced gravel). I think a liner or three of some sort is in order, though. Graphene, Kevlar, duck tape and visqueen, whatever.
Mind thoroughly expanded! Great video Fraser. If it was possible, it would be great for you to interview some of the chief designers/engineers that are building these amazing robots and missions.
Question: What would the world be like if the space race had never ended? Funding for NASA as a percentage of national budget peaked in 1966 at 4.4%. Imagine if it continued to be funded at that level or a bit more (which would give it a $200 billion budget in 2019).
Depends on why we'd continue the space race. Launching rockets to the moon was a great public-facing way to prove to other countries that we can build precise intercontinental ballistic missiles that are reliable enough we can confidently put humans on board. Hence why NASA's funding peaked well before the missions to the moon did - once we got that out of the way, there was no longer a strong incentive to keep funding space technology at that level.
The short answer would be that there could be a lot of reasons working together. If the operation of Space Agencies continued to be a popular source of national prestige it could have driven public support. If military thinkers wanted to take the weaponized side of the space race from offense to defense (the next logical step after being able to launch ICBMs is to be able to shoot down the other guy's) it could provide a rationale. If the Space Industrial Complex (not really distinct from the Military one since it would include a lot of the same contractors) lobbied successfully for more funding for Space R&D for obvious financial reasons it could grease the political wheels.
Joel if you do this for any other reason than to help mankind as a whole while saving our Planet forget it. Everything run in a capitalistic system doesn't work. It was only meant for the banks only. Because you need a dictatorship to run this system. It has no compassion for Humanity an doesn't work for any other system ie the insurance industry nolonger does what it was designed to do, in fact it does the opposite, an is now a inflationary system. Collapsing this system alone would bring back the middle class.
Stare starry eyed into the distance all you want. When companies like General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and even SpaceX are involved, money changes hands and money that big has a political component.
Joel, so sorry for you, all is money, for it is the destruction of science. Telling you what you can have an cannot have. The people around you will tire of you, sighting, I can't work with this guy because he has no vision an is holding all of back. While others move forward sighting what happened to the great one, we hang head in sorrow, it was all because of Joel.
Hi Fraser - Thanks for sharing such quality research. Question: Having a huge rotating space station - as proposed by the Gateway Foundation, or as seen in the movie 2001- Space Odyssey - makes sense to me, especially to help people adjust to space life (to see if they even *can* adjust) without being too far from earth. Then there are all kinds of scientific experiments that could be conducted at different 'G' levels (depending on how close you were to the hub). We don't know nearly enough yet about how different orders of life e.g. microbes like bacteria, phages, archaea, fungi and so on might morph, mutate and multiply under different conditions. But here's two physics questions: 1/ How many 100s or 1000s of tons would such a large space station have to be for its rotation and axis not to be perturbed by any on board activities? 2/ As a giant gyroscope how would its axis want to align itself as it orbited?
Fraser, really like your work and appreciate your channel. You're one of the motivations for me to start my own UA-cam channel regarding similar topics as yours. Thanks for your work and inspiration!! 😊
I've been waiting for someone to address this most important subject. Thank you so much for this educational video. Oh, and your graphics are top notch.
Great subject this one Mr Fraser , and one that keeps on giving (thanks for posting ) , and so many cool projects pointed out happening , No doubt the big ball and chain around all these projects is Money . One thing i always keep thinking .... or maybe dreaming is , wouldnt it be nice if we could build one or preferably several super large permanently manned habitat/factorys in space ........... that are not necessarily focused on getting across the galaxy fast , because they are so big , so well built and are well supplied with raw materials and man power and tools and sustainable living machinery , that the time factor in space would be of little consequence (other than perhaps boredom or need for holidays :) ) . But i imagine these vessels like gigantic mother ships that just potter along at moderate speed in space and get to destination X , and then send down smaller ships to mine and excavate more wanted raw materials , maybe im dreamin , but i imagine making a trip to the icy moons for a start and loading up bulk amounts of ice , some of which might be utilized to power the mother ship and the smaller one if refined to rocket fuel and oxygen ???? with the main bulk being transported to colonys perhaps as gas or fuel , or even just plain old refined water , all of which would be refined on the mother ship . if there was several of these ships doing shuttles , at some point one could be going , another heading in the opposing direction , and perhaps they could even restock each other with certain raw materials or man power at some meeting point on route . I`m an old codger , i will probably be pushing up daisys long before any of this stuff happens ..... if it ever does :) . I look at a lot of this space stuff , and see a lot of it as a logistics problem more than anything else . Cheers .
Thanks a lot! I really think space-based manufacturing is going to change everything. That'll be the technology that really turns us into a solar system spanning civilization.
"...wish I was younger..." just hang on for another 15 years or so and you could live forever. There is a convergence between medicine and computing that could see rapid improvements to health. There are loads of resources going into AI right now that could focus on a bottomless money-maker... healthcare.
If I was more organized, we'd reach out to the scientists earlier and get them more involved in our videos. So many cool graphics and simulations out there.
Combine AI and space robotics to do the work and send humans after the work is done to enjoy space tours etc. If we set up an AI system in the future to control the space robots we could do all this for free. If we used humans it would be way cost prohibitive. And it would be way less efficient and it would take way longer. With robots that could reproduce themselves and make tools and excavators etc. it could all happen way quicker (and eventually) cost nothing.
@@frasercain It would take a long time but if they spent the same money on robotics instead of trying to send out humans, it wouldn't take as long (hopefully). Humans in space have to be paid, have food, water, sleep, warmth (the list goes on). Robots won't need anything if we get to that point. They would attend to their own needs (energy and maintenance). And it's the only way we are going to be able to build stuff like O'Neil Cylinders.
Fraser, I just read a CNN article about "space grease". This chemical, "aliphatic carbon" is said to be a soot like, greasy substance, and there is quite a lot of it in interstellar space within the Milky Way. The article is brief so I was hoping you could uncover more. My biggest concern about extremely fast space travel is slamming into small pebbles in space, I'd imagine this space grease would pose the same problem.
This is the same kind of stuff that they found on Ceres, so this stuff is everywhere. At relativistic speeds, even grains of sand would hit your spacecraft like bombs. It's a big problem.
I'm sure I will, like I said, I'm just scratching the surface with some of the cool projects in the works right now. I could probably dig up hundreds of separate projects in this field.
Years ago in the 80s I saw a smelting and production device to build girders or structures in space on a show called Tomorrows World . It was a pretty small self contained unit and they demonstrated it working here on Earth . I was a young teenager then and I was 50 in 2021 so im sure that tech must have some use right now.
amazing. but as the idea of manufacturing in space is mentioned more and more often I have been wondering... how exactly is the manufacturing in space (off planets) going to work? is it plausible for structures to be built while in orbit, moving in kilometers per second? or have they thought of a way of building things without following a particular orbit?
They'll follow whatever orbit they're already in. So, if you launch an Archinaut into low Earth orbit, it'll be able to build things while zipping around the Earth at 28,000 km/h. For the spacecraft, it'll feel like it's in zero gravity.
Great video Fraser. Kinds ties into a question i asked in an earlier video about 3D printing objects on the moon, very interesting topic. Definitely think it will be a huge thing in the future.
Fraiser, Love the channel and appreciate all that you do. Quick question, considering the current global dust storm on Mars, what contingency plans do NASA have in place for the InSight mission should there be another one in November?
Are there any projects in the planning stages to replace the International Space Station that you're aware of? And are we capable of a more "Clarkian type" which is to say rotating station?
The next station in the works will be the Deep Space Gateway, and they're considering a rotating module on it to provide some artificial gravity. ua-cam.com/video/xFs1EzRb--Y/v-deo.html&list=PLbJ42wpShvml6Eg22WjWAR-6QUufHFh2v&index=33
3-D printing structures with regolith and magnesium oxide and binder isn't the long term solution unless the magnesium oxide and binder can be manufactured using materials from the moon. The prospector style missions make sense at this point so they can find out what minerals are where. It would make sense to build the first moon bases on or near minerals that can be processed into something that can be turned into structures without the addition of any materials from earth. As a very crude example, nickel-iron powder could be separated from regolith by magnets then solar powered 3-D printing could melt the metal into those hollow bird-bone-like structures and the cavities filled with some of the sifted and metal-depleted regolith you extracted the metal from. You're going to process a lot of regolith to extract usable amounts of metal, so it would be good to design mining machines that can be 3-D printed with whatever quality of metal you can produce from regolith. These machines should require a minimum amount of machined parts. Then you need to make the machine shop tools to machine the parts for your mining machines, and you want all or nearly all of this made from lunar materials. The good news is that there will be a lot of jobs that need doing in a moon base, lots of stuff gets made and an off-earth economy can grow rapidly using in-situ materials. The bad news is that there is a huge amount of infrastructure needed for the minimum-size self-supporting bootstrap starter colony. Figuring out the minimum toolset that needs to come from earth to mine raw materials and process it into everything you need to build all the shelters, all the machinery, and grow all the food for everyone is a much tougher and more interesting problem than adding binders brought from earth to whatever dirt you find there. Even if your shelter is only one percent binder, you'd need huge amounts of it shipped up from earth to fill a never-ending need. Kickstarting a true off-world economy is a much more worthy goal. There would be many opportunities for innovation in manufacturing all the little things that can't initially be made there. I can imagine a time when machine tools like lathes and milling machines are made from lunar materials but the actual hardened cutters are not. Those cutting edges (like the carbide tips on a saw blade) brought from earth would be so expensive, there would be a huge incentive for anyone who can find a way to make them from local materials. This would be true of absolutely everything in the base.
This is why we need to get to places like the Moon and start testing out our techniques. We don't know which methods are going to work best with in situ resources and which will require large amounts of imported tech from Earth.
Any idea how much of the James Webb observation calendar is already filled up? What's the test object to see if it's up and running? And who gets (or already has) the first real slot of observation time, or what might it be used for? Any idea when they're going to go for a 10-day deep field type image?
They haven't completed the first call for proposals yet, you've got until 2019 to get your first request in: jwst-docs.stsci.edu/display/JSP/James+Webb+Space+Telescope+Call+for+Proposals+for+Cycle+1
We have been researchg the supply-chain for space resources operations, it's "there" but half still has to be developed, e.g. new niche startups focussing on lunar surface and asteroid inspection, sampling, extraction etc. You can keep in contact with us to find out more.
We're just at the beginning of this, but I think the future will be all about space-based resource extraction and manufacturing. Some day rockets will barely ever launch from Earth because there's so much already out in space.
@@frasercain Two words when it comes to manufacturing even fairly low technology: supply chain. Very, very long supply chains that you can't just vanish away by saying "3D printing". To be able to many of the complex things we have without input from Earth (massive, ridiculously costly input from Earth) we need many long chains of facilities, with many people to maintain it. There's a reason our planet is dotted with large industrial constructions. Even leaving out the simple structural materials you could more easily create, ultimately you need to launch a city from Earth if you want to create a city in space, 'cos a city is what you need for a broad industrial base - a city of large complex machines in huge variety.
@@andrewgoodall2183 I agree that lots of stuff is needed, and the ideal situation is lots of different materials being simultaneously and independently produced in space, but I think we must bear in mind we are on the cusp of a major revolution in AI capability, which will be mediated by the advent of cheap high density & low power neuromorphic circuitry, which will get us spectacular increases in Ai, and thence robotic capability. I envision robotically managed off-planet projects, guided remotely but not micro-managed, from earth. Consider, a competent robot needs no material food, air nor water, just reliable mechanics and solar power. I expect that before we have a substantial human presence off-planet, we will have pretty much attained a critical mass of robotic industry there to support our arrival. I anticipate this century (barring excessive earthside stupidity) will comprise the projects to put us in that position. This will prove much cheaper and easier than trying to do it with local human presence.
It may be easier to construct dome like structures like the millennium dome. Given that these structures May easily enclose larger areas allowing construction to take place inside.
Fraser would it be feasible to collect and recycle the space junk that is in orbit? It would solve 2 problems at one stroke. Also what is the name of that institution Wochester? Where is it based? I can't find any reference to it.
Thank you for this amazing video. I have one question. Theoretically, upto how many stages can we integrate into a rocket and what are the main constraining factors to this limit?
There's no real limit, and I've heard of ideas for 4 and 5 stage rockets, but at a certain point, your fuel tanks are too small and the weight of the rockets are too big. Also, the engines are the most expensive part of the rocket, so costs come into play.
Best episode in a while .Super interesting. I'll be certainly waiting for more on the subject! The part about becoming a true solar system civilization reminded me of xkcd's "Newton's Trajectories" ^_^
Great video Fraser. I agree, it makes a lot of sense to think that economic incentive might be what will ultimately drive us to build off world or create zero G industries.
Hi Fraser. Are solar panels that are manufactured here on Earth specifically designed for the solar radiation coming from the sun, or would they work on a spacecraft visiting another star once it gets there?
You mention that there is a propulsion system which would mine water from a comet. Would this cause problems for other high speed travel through the solar system which would then encounter the water exhaust? I guess more generally, is there a problem with any exhaust material creating clouds which would not settle into gravity wells or automatically clump?
Aaron Day No, the water exhaust would be comparatively low velocity, and would spread like a gas in the vacuum. It would essentially vanish as soon as it left the rocket. Talk about steampunk, though...
Fraser, If we ever created a Dyson swarm or sphere, what would the effect of preventing all that solar radiation from radiating be on the planets? Especially those further out. Would the added mass effect the gravitational force of the sun?
James Aberson even with a massive swarm we could still allow the sun's radiation to reach the planets, from what I understand a Dyson sphere isn't as viable of an option as a swarm since keeping such a massive structure rigidly intact completely around the sun is probably more work than it's worth. In stead a swarm of independently adjustable and moveable pieces seems like a more reasonable project to pursue. As far as gravitational effects I would assume it'd be so negligible that it couldn't really influence such large bodies like planets or even comets/asteroids.
Petite Bourgeoisie Thanks! I'm not smart enough to think these ideas up on my own. I just repeat what I've heard from many other people who are far smarter than I am, they just explain it in a way that I can understand thankfully.
A Dyson swarm wouldn't be opaque until it was ginormously enormous. Not an immediate concern. If it ever becomes a problem, you could arrange for the swarm elements to tilt / open up to let 100% of the usual light to hit the planets. The mass to make the swarm would presumably be taken from objects inside the solar system, so there's no difference as far as the sun is concerned. (The mass of everything else in the system combined is like ~1% of the sun's mass. The Earth is a speck of dust.) (Dyson spheres are unnecessary madness. Swarms are better.)
Twirlip Of The Mists "~1% of the sun's mass"... the breakdown of mass in our solar system is 99.85% is the sun, .15% is everything else. Of everything else Jupiter is more than two-thirds of it. Everything else (Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Earth, Venus, Mars, Mercury, Pluto, Kuiper belt objects, asteroids, comets, etc) make up less than .05%.
Anything that got blocked would receive less illumination from the Sun and cool down. Obviously you'd want to put your Dyson Swarm just behind the Earth so it still gets as much radiation as possible without blocking the Earth.
While regolith is fine, I am working a methods to be able to drill and mine on Moon/Mars. Most common drilling methods require the weight of the drill string to "push" into the earth. That won't work very well at 1/6th gravity. And hauling a lot of drill pipe to the moon seems very expensive and impractical.
Conservation of angular momentum, plus gravitational (and occasionally mechanical) interactions between all the particles and bodies in the system. Same as galaxies. Something orbiting outside the plane gets tugged toward the plane until it settles nicely into the plane. There are videos on UA-cam about it.
Anon B The sun does rotate, but the Sun's rotation isn't an important factor in making the other stuff rotate or revolve, or in forming the orbital plane.
In the near term, all we would want in space would be rocket fuel - which is basically water. Some day we'll get nearly all our resources from space, and do nearly all our industry and agriculture in space.
Is there a way to protect non-earth construction projects (ie, landing pads, roads, etc)? I can see us building one, only for an asteroid to take it out.
Wow! This maybe the most important tech in space. I want to know more, especially those projects that coming up in the near-term. Does anybody what the Chinese are doing in this area?
The Chinese just launched a mission to the far side of the Moon, and they're sending another rover there soon. The Chinese are seriously interested in exploring the Moon.
In a hundred years we will have space robots developing space so we can enjoy the infrastructure in space, on asteroids etc, even O'Neil Cylinders (look that up). And in a hundred years it could end up costing nothing cos the robots could reproduce themselves and build tools etc. and 3D print stuff, all for no cost. And the moneyless "space economy" could be completely separate to the world economy. If we tried to use humans to develop space and make stuff like O'Neil Cylinders, it would simply be cost prohibitive. It would cost more than the world economy is worth. It will only happen if it's free or it won't happen (that simple). And if it did, it would only be on an extremely tiny scale (and no O'Neil cylinders).
Other similar videos about colonizing planets were giving us a story book but frazer is giving us a blueprint, a mission sheetplan, a manual book, u name it the actual stuff.
Question. If the moon's far side has had the majority of impacts, couldn't we find lots of minerals etc there for the moon colony? Millions of years of asteroid collisions must have left a lot of debris.
Mineral resources will be everywhere on the Moon. What's in short supply is water. A very small amount of water may have collected in the sunless craters at the Moon's poles but the rest has been cooked away by the sun. For significant colonization we need to wrangle a comet or go out past the snowline and haul in an icy object.
There would be all kinds of minerals all over the Moon, but it's going to be tough to dig down and get them. Easier to just collect small asteroids and break them apart for material.
Ahh, the Archinaut sent shivers down my spine, they do conceptually feel like space spiders enough to trigger my arachnophobia :) Super stoked about the idea though.. still think we need to heavily invest into alternative launch assist systems - even if BFR in it's ultimate form would be an order of magnitude cheaper than falcon heavy is - I would still need to pay almost $11.5k to ship me (on a very good day:) to space naked...
That's still too much for the future I hope to live in. I'm talking about the future where I will ride the moon buggy over the craters outside the moon-spa and see the earthrise with my own eyes... that future requires at least one more order of magnitude decrease (better 1.5/2:) in price per kg to LEO
The BFR could get the cost down to about $75/kg, which isn't too bad. I'd be about $7500 to get into orbit. And then the space infrastructure can take over.
oh, that would make them 1.5 orders of magnitude lower than falcon heavy (I think i saw a $1700/kg to LEO in NASA's website for f-heavy:). Not bad!... still that last order of magnitude to drop it to $7.5/kg would unlock space for the rest of the world:)
3D printing in space should be more efficient as you could get away with less infill and remove the need support structure for more complicated shapes.
I've watched your episode of time dilation. So can we effect aging by altering velocity of time?? I mean in an inertial frame of reference.. I know we take time as base for every measurement because we cannot change time. We can only change the reference distance or whatever it is that can be measured or changed..
To put it another way, no matter what speed you travel, nor how deep the gravity well in which you stand, time to you (that is, your subjective rate at which time passes) does not appear to change. However, as we saw in the movie _Interstellar,_ your subjective hour spent deep in (for instance) a strong gravitational field might seem like years or decades to someone well outside that field floating in microgravity. The watches on your respective wrists during this experiment will seem to tick at the same rate they always have, but when you both come back to the same place to compare, the fact that time has been passing differently will be clear because the two watches will show very different times, & you and your partner will have perceived different amounts of time as having passed. Because of this, it is (at least, theoretically) possible for a human being travelling at (something like) 95% of light speed to travel to the edge of the observable universe within their own subjective lifetime: yes, the distance as observed from Earth is billions of light years, but the time dilation (the word for this stretching/compressing of time) at that high speed is so severe, that the time experienced on such a trip would only amount to several decades... time which for the traveler would seem to pass at a "normal" rate, even though the Earth & our solar system will (likely) have long since ceased to exist by the time the journey was complete.
Hi Fraser , do You know how many black holes have been discovered just in our Milky Way Galaxy (other than just the super massive black hole) ? If so then where are they ? THanks Man , I found You from Your Open Space visits with John Michael Godier , then I found out that You also did one with Isaac Arthur and also Cody Reeder . I also think that We should "Practice" on the Moon before going to Mars for lots of reasons . I love Your videos and have binged on many of them over the past 3 days . Glad to know Your channel now , look forward to much more :) . Take Care .
Thanks Kyle, I don't know how many have been discovered, but there are a lot. I heard recently that astronomers found a swarm of them orbiting around that central Milky Way SMBH. Sounds like you've found a lot of great channels. I like those guys. :-)
Ok , Thank You Fraser , now I at least know that there's alot of them , because no one ever talks about them and their distribution . I already knew about those channels (that's how I found You) but I absolutely love that We all know each other , The YT science community :) . Take Care and thank You for replying :)
QUESTION The gravity is property of curvature of space time right? The closer you get to the cruve the more gravity you get right? Gravity is not like magnetic attraction right? the how the hell they say that the gravity is zero in the middle of earth?
Hi Fraser. Have been listening to your episodes for over 2 years but never left a comment. Maybe it's me but it seems like you increased the pauses between your sentences this time. If so, I really do prefer the previous pace as it feels like it slows down the video right now. Keep up the amazing work and looking forward for your next upload!
Thanks Timo, one thing that we've been experimenting with is trying to have more pauses in the video, where there's just cool graphics on the screen, so it's not just me rambling non-stop through the video. But we'll keep on working on it, to make it all come together.
Fraser Cain - you are not rambling Mr Fraser, you are actually among the ones easy to understand, but to adjust the speed and/or to be avare of the importance is good, not too slow and not too fast
I've been a fan since Astronomy Cast. (Is "since 2005" possible?) And I'm sure I comment too much. No real complaints, but I thought the pauses here were a wee bit distracting / jarring. (I know it was for the video.) (TBH I find most imagery and video distracting unless it's directly relevant and instructive. Not because I dont like images, but because they're seldom relevant or instructive. Not just this channel - it's been true of the whole 21st century imho.)
We try to make the graphics and videos as directly connected to what I'm saying as possible. There are a lot of videos out there that just play audio and put totally unrelated graphics on the screen. We're trying to learn how to make the best possible videos we can, and that means experimenting, and that means failing... all the time.
Random question I have after watching Isaac Arthur's Newest Video: Post-Scarcity and Purpose. He mentioned Humanity doing anything to make sure we felt like we had a purpose, with also colonizing other Star Systems being one of the many purposes. I then remembered you saying that we would have robots doing that for us. So, after all that stuff, my question: Why do you believe that Humanity wouldn't try colonizing other Star Systems. I'm not saying all, just the few that think it's their purpose in their lives to try and colonize a new planet for Humanity. P.S. Sorry for such the long question.
I think that humanity will send robotic spacecraft to other stars to explore the Milky Way, but it's so difficult to get anywhere else in the galaxy, I think we're starting to appreciate how amazing the Earth is.
@@frasercain I would be surprised if 500 years from now the moon doesn't have several million inhabitants. The moon will go through a boom period when it is the industrial and transportation hub of the solar system - first stop for outgoing earthlings, first major X-T (extra-terrestrial ie off-earth) manufacturing centre for all the major solar system infrastructure - spacecraft, solar power, etc. and consequently first major X-T population centre, with human support - agriculture, commerce, social structure etc. It will also be supporting some of the first really major X-T big science - the inevitably mentioned mammoth telescopes, but also globe circling particle accelerator (with far better beam vacuum than available on earth, and of course huge amounts of power for the taking), and lots of projects that couldn't be contemplated on planets with an ecosystem to worry about. The focus of emigration will expand outward, but there is a social dynamic to consider - the descendants of the first settlers will have a particular attachment to the soil of the species most audacious colonization, not to mention a certain degree of inherent prestige, and the environment will be steadily enhanced to the point of being a paradise, so no sacrifice of earthly pleasures, plus the gravity bonus, and the spectacular view. I imagine they will wear the moniker of lunatic with great pride.
This is why we have to be really careful when we explore other worlds, to make sure there aren't already lifeforms there that we could be messing with.
We could develop robots that could build stuff in space and on the moon and Mars etc. (like labs, hotels, telescopes and life support stuff). Humans could then go to space (in luxury) instead of the high cost of initial human space exploration and bringing along those depressing inflatable pods… and nothing else to go to except dry cold barren land. Robots don't need food, pay, temp control, oxygen, sleep, the list goes on, on how much more efficient robots could be (doing stuff in space instead of humans). Then when its complete humans would go (and there would be actually something to go to).
I made that RANT up recently before I saw this video (that basically says the same thing) and I was really excited to see someone on UA-cam with the same passion, so I had to lay it on you. Well done!
My idea to improve Mars is to guide selected asteroids to Mars where they would 1, warm the planet 2, provide raw materials for manufacturing 3, add mass to the planet thereby increasing Mars' gravity (which would be better for earthlings).
It's a region where matter and energy are compressed so densely that the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light. But it used to be a star before it died, so... both?
Ive always thought the plan to build a space ship inside a huge nickel iron asteroid would be cool. But What if you flew a robot manufacturing plant to an asteroid made out of just loosely bound regolith and rocks, and used a binding agent like glue, or heat even, to turn the asteroid into the basis of a space cement? Then you could 3D print the space cement into any shape you needed. A skeleton for a solar array, or the outer shell of a habitat. Then you could add to your space platform by collecting more asteroids and processing them.
Hey Fraser, I love your channel. Question: If we ever figure out the technical difficulties of interstellar travel, do you think humans can overcome the psychological challenges? And if we could, if a person arrives at the destination, generations later, how much would he be different from a human on earth? Can we still call him a human, considering he's not born here? Thanks very much! Seven.
I love this topic. We're finally getting to the point where we can become a truly spacefaring species.
Fuck You Google - yes I agree, stuff like this is really interesting
Fuck You Google I believe we could have started proper lunar colonisation decades ago. It's a crying shame we didn't.
Yeah, there are a lot of really interesting projects in the works.
+Fuck you Google
It would be expensive to initiate it, but once they establish robotic space development it may not cost a cent to make "Elysium" and "Death Stars" etc. That shit would be too expensive to build by humans (forget it) but once robotics are up-and-running with full automation and AI, there should be no more cost... just robotics constructing stuff (including themselves). Robotics would have to be well established and many different robots and be able to mine the asteroids etc. before they could build anything like "Elysium". And that would be the only way we could do it (and for free).
Can't wait for that pesky sustained fusion power generator design to be resolved.
I've heard water-based propulsion systems referred to as "teakettle drives"
That's a cool name. :-)
Thanks! Now, finally, we're getting serious about real-world technologies for going into space & staying there. It's about time. I've been saying for years now that we're simply not ready to go to Mars. We've been talking & talking about doing this or going there - all without getting down to specifics. Now, though, we actually have some of the necessary things in place, such as 3D printing in space, ideas for using regolith for building, & extracting minerals & gasses for processing & use. I'm glad we've finally decided to get real. Now maybe we can go back to the Moon & stay there, putting up satellites, building (or at least assembling) telescopes, & operating resource extraction & power generating units - as well as all the science that can be done. Then - maybe - I'll feel we're ready to go to Mars & do more than just say we've been there (& not go back for who knows how long - especially if it ended in tragedy, which it well might have.) Now, I'm beginning to have some confidence. Let's keep at it! Rikki Tikki.
It's going to get pretty exciting in the next couple of decades. I'll keep you updated. :-)
these videos have rekindled the love that I used to have for astronomy when I was younger
This needs a part two!
Hah, okay, I'll keep that in mind.
I took a shot every time Fraser said space. I'm dead now!
+ Little cripple Who was shooting at you?
Wait... How are you writing this ???
Space space, got to have my space. I just did a search in the script - 43 times.
Little Cripple you should watch one of his questions show and take a shot at every "sort of"
You'll get smashed in no time :D lol
1 extra space for added answerness
"Sort of". Sign, that's totally my "um". I really need to dig that out of my vocabulary.
Favorite topic. Please feel free to just keep making videos just like this over and over again. Can't get enough!
I've actually been getting into 3D printing recently and I have to say if they can manage to make durable, printable filament out of in-situ resources, then it solves a LOT of engineering challenges in terms of being able to adapt on the fly to changing needs and conditions. In my experience, the most time is actually spent designing the object to print, with the print itself being so easy to replicate it would be trivial to replace worn out parts once you have the design for them.
3D printing in microgravity would also reduce the need for support materials and make printing in general less of a hassle then it is with gravity always threatening to make your filament sag before it has a chance to cool.
Yeah, building stuff in space means it never needs to suffer Earth gravity.
Manufacturing in space is the key. Solar furnace for smelting raw ore, solar power to extract water and gases and solar power for manufacturing. Can't wait to see what private industry comes up with
Yeah, based on my research for this episode, I think we're going to see things accelerate pretty rapidly, actually.
Note that it is far more likely that any resources found in space will be put to use in space first, not hauled back to Earth until we built a fast and practical and safe way to do it. Because of the tremendous cost in energy & money of launching something out of Earth’s atmosphere or back into it, the most efficient use of resources extracted in space will be right there: in space.
As I said, as long as we do not have an economical, fast and safe way to bring the materials back to Earth, it will mostly stay in space (thankfully or unfortunately).
This is a nice subject that makes us dream (well in my case) and think about the past exploitation and colonization of the North and South America in a certain way.
Have a great weekend! :-)
Sébastien Raymond if it'd precious like gold or platinum, it's coming straight back earth.
It's EASY, as well as safe and practical, to return stuff to Earth. The first few hundred tons is expensive though.
One idea is build reentry gliders out of asteroidal material. Iron and silicon, basically. Crude is adequate for a start, but eventually we could make them very fancy. Materials could be landed at the receiving docks of factories, direct from space. Cheaper and easier than rail freight. Asteroidal iron will be cheaper than earth iron, delivery included.
Eventually, despite delivering megatons of stuff to Earth, almost all of it will be used in space.
It's really very interesting, at the same time, don't you think that the return trip must be more profitable than the actual trips and the extraction itself. We are talking here about tons of equipment plus tons of materials confronted with gravity when they come back.
Personally, the project that comes to my mind is the space elevator (the idea of Tsiolkovsky). I do not know if it could be feasible one day and I doubt the safety of such a machine, but who knows?
Have a nice weekend !
Getting off Earth is hard, getting back is easy.
Creating habitats should probably focus on building bunkers, simplest work around to the radiation is to dig and in low gravity digging is easier. A solar powered foundry for working metal would seem necessary too.
Bulldoze a trench. Drop a prefab shelter (maybe a balloon) in the trench. Cover the trench. Sorted.
Or just plop the shelter on the surface and pile rocks/gravel on top. That's maybe harder to do - you need to lift the rocks higher. You need a bigger pile, so you need more rocks.
The moon is sort of made of ready-mix cement. Maybe pour concrete instead. Maybe make the shelters from mooncrete too.
Or literally pitch tents in a lunar lava tube. (Seems dangerous and inconvenient to me, but it's not a bad idea for early missions with minimal infrastructure.)
If those regolith printers work, they'll just dig up the lunar dirt, and make it into lunar igloos.
Makes too much since, thus why NASA will not do it and SpaceX and Blue Origin will. Start digging throw in a prefab liner and cover it with material, perhaps pump some hydrogen into the ceiling prefab just to be safe. Two men with a electric tiller and shovels could have multiple habitats up in hours.
Fraser Cain if you put your lunar igloo in the shade - like even under an umbrella - then you can make authentic igloos out of ice, or out of ice-crete (iced gravel).
I think a liner or three of some sort is in order, though. Graphene, Kevlar, duck tape and visqueen, whatever.
Nice, just don't let them melt.
9:00 Arkanaut building things in space - that is a very exciting prospect.
Yeah, it's like a three armed space spider that spins space station struts.
Mind thoroughly expanded! Great video Fraser. If it was possible, it would be great for you to interview some of the chief designers/engineers that are building these amazing robots and missions.
Hah, I can bring some of them onto my live QA and you can ask them questions. :-)
one of my favorite youtubers
Thanks!
Are there any plans for developing less bulky space suits? This seems like something worth doing if we're going to be working in space.
Yeah, there are a bunch in the works. I've got plans to do a video about them at some point.
Question: What would the world be like if the space race had never ended? Funding for NASA as a percentage of national budget peaked in 1966 at 4.4%. Imagine if it continued to be funded at that level or a bit more (which would give it a $200 billion budget in 2019).
Depends on why we'd continue the space race. Launching rockets to the moon was a great public-facing way to prove to other countries that we can build precise intercontinental ballistic missiles that are reliable enough we can confidently put humans on board. Hence why NASA's funding peaked well before the missions to the moon did - once we got that out of the way, there was no longer a strong incentive to keep funding space technology at that level.
The short answer would be that there could be a lot of reasons working together. If the operation of Space Agencies continued to be a popular source of national prestige it could have driven public support. If military thinkers wanted to take the weaponized side of the space race from offense to defense (the next logical step after being able to launch ICBMs is to be able to shoot down the other guy's) it could provide a rationale. If the Space Industrial Complex (not really distinct from the Military one since it would include a lot of the same contractors) lobbied successfully for more funding for Space R&D for obvious financial reasons it could grease the political wheels.
Joel if you do this for any other reason than to help mankind as a whole while saving our Planet forget it. Everything run in a capitalistic system doesn't work. It was only meant for the banks only. Because you need a dictatorship to run this system. It has no compassion for Humanity an doesn't work for any other system ie the insurance industry nolonger does what it was designed to do, in fact it does the opposite, an is now a inflationary system. Collapsing this system alone would bring back the middle class.
Stare starry eyed into the distance all you want. When companies like General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and even SpaceX are involved, money changes hands and money that big has a political component.
Joel, so sorry for you, all is money, for it is the destruction of science. Telling you what you can have an cannot have. The people around you will tire of you, sighting, I can't work with this guy because he has no vision an is holding all of back. While others move forward sighting what happened to the great one, we hang head in sorrow, it was all because of Joel.
Hi Fraser - Thanks for sharing such quality research.
Question: Having a huge rotating space station - as proposed by the Gateway Foundation, or as seen in the movie 2001- Space Odyssey - makes sense to me, especially to help people adjust to space life (to see if they even *can* adjust) without being too far from earth. Then there are all kinds of scientific experiments that could be conducted at different 'G' levels (depending on how close you were to the hub). We don't know nearly enough yet about how different orders of life e.g. microbes like bacteria, phages, archaea, fungi and so on might morph, mutate and multiply under different conditions. But here's two physics questions:
1/ How many 100s or 1000s of tons would such a large space station have to be for its rotation and axis not to be perturbed by any on board activities?
2/ As a giant gyroscope how would its axis want to align itself as it orbited?
I covered that in this video (spoiler alert... a lot)
ua-cam.com/video/SHfUbNRO-3A/v-deo.html&index=14
This is the video I was waiting for! :D
I hope it was worth the wait. :-)
Fraser, really like your work and appreciate your channel. You're one of the motivations for me to start my own UA-cam channel regarding similar topics as yours. Thanks for your work and inspiration!! 😊
Thanks a lot, let me know when you've got some videos going.
I've been waiting for someone to address this most important subject. Thank you so much for this educational video. Oh, and your graphics are top notch.
Thanks for watching!
Great subject this one Mr Fraser , and one that keeps on giving (thanks for posting ) , and so many cool projects pointed out happening ,
No doubt the big ball and chain around all these projects is Money .
One thing i always keep thinking .... or maybe dreaming is ,
wouldnt it be nice if we could build one or preferably several super large permanently manned habitat/factorys in space ........... that are not necessarily focused on getting across the galaxy fast , because they are so big , so well built and are well supplied with raw materials and man power and tools and sustainable living machinery , that the time factor in space would be of little consequence (other than perhaps boredom or need for holidays :) ) .
But i imagine these vessels like gigantic mother ships that just potter along at moderate speed in space and get to destination X , and then send down smaller ships to mine and excavate more wanted raw materials ,
maybe im dreamin ,
but i imagine making a trip to the icy moons for a start and loading up bulk amounts of ice , some of which might be utilized to power the mother ship and the smaller one if refined to rocket fuel and oxygen ???? with the main bulk being transported to colonys perhaps as gas or fuel , or even just plain old refined water ,
all of which would be refined on the mother ship .
if there was several of these ships doing shuttles , at some point one could be going , another heading in the opposing direction , and perhaps they could even restock each other with certain raw materials or man power at some meeting point on route .
I`m an old codger , i will probably be pushing up daisys long before any of this stuff happens ..... if it ever does :) .
I look at a lot of this space stuff , and see a lot of it as a logistics problem more than anything else .
Cheers .
Thanks a lot! I really think space-based manufacturing is going to change everything. That'll be the technology that really turns us into a solar system spanning civilization.
NASA's Innovative Advance Concepts (NIAC) is work currently studying most of these and more!
Yeah, I love watching what's coming out of NIAC.
Interesting!!! Thank you 😎👍
Thanks for watching!
This is awesome, I wish I was younger so I can see further where this goes lol
A lot of it is going to happen pretty quickly, I think you might be pleasantly surprised.
Fraser Cain I trust you'll keep me well informed :) thanks
Happy to do it. :-)
"...wish I was younger..." just hang on for another 15 years or so and you could live forever. There is a convergence between medicine and computing that could see rapid improvements to health. There are loads of resources going into AI right now that could focus on a bottomless money-maker... healthcare.
Great point. Soon human lifespan will increase at one year per year.
At 5 minutes in, I'm loving the steam powered probe! Fred Dibnah would be proud!
Where do u get those animations from?
All over the place, Planetary Resources and Made In Space gave us a bunch of animations to use, which was really helpful.
And the Korea space agency releases some of the YT videos under CC
If I was more organized, we'd reach out to the scientists earlier and get them more involved in our videos. So many cool graphics and simulations out there.
This was one of my favorite videos of yours so far. I love this topic. Kudos!
Thanks a lot, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Combine AI and space robotics to do the work and send humans after the work is done to enjoy space tours etc. If we set up an AI system in the future to control the space robots we could do all this for free. If we used humans it would be way cost prohibitive. And it would be way less efficient and it would take way longer. With robots that could reproduce themselves and make tools and excavators etc. it could all happen way quicker (and eventually) cost nothing.
If we can get to the point of self-replicating robots, then everything changes.
@@frasercain It would take a long time but if they spent the same money on robotics instead of trying to send out humans, it wouldn't take as long (hopefully). Humans in space have to be paid, have food, water, sleep, warmth (the list goes on). Robots won't need anything if we get to that point. They would attend to their own needs (energy and maintenance). And it's the only way we are going to be able to build stuff like O'Neil Cylinders.
Fraser, I just read a CNN article about "space grease". This chemical, "aliphatic carbon" is said to be a soot like, greasy substance, and there is quite a lot of it in interstellar space within the Milky Way. The article is brief so I was hoping you could uncover more. My biggest concern about extremely fast space travel is slamming into small pebbles in space, I'd imagine this space grease would pose the same problem.
This is the same kind of stuff that they found on Ceres, so this stuff is everywhere. At relativistic speeds, even grains of sand would hit your spacecraft like bombs. It's a big problem.
Please go deeper into this topic! Excelent video! :)
I'm sure I will, like I said, I'm just scratching the surface with some of the cool projects in the works right now. I could probably dig up hundreds of separate projects in this field.
please do
Great information and animation! Please keep teaching us layman science enthusiasts.
Thanks!
I really like how they defer to nature and the structure of birds bones for how to build bases efficiently.
It's a pretty clever idea, of course, in that lower gravity you could build even higher.
Years ago in the 80s I saw a smelting and production device to build girders or structures in space on a show called Tomorrows World . It was a pretty small self contained unit and they demonstrated it working here on Earth . I was a young teenager then and I was 50 in 2021 so im sure that tech must have some use right now.
amazing.
but as the idea of manufacturing in space is mentioned more and more often I have been wondering... how exactly is the manufacturing in space (off planets) going to work? is it plausible for structures to be built while in orbit, moving in kilometers per second? or have they thought of a way of building things without following a particular orbit?
They'll follow whatever orbit they're already in. So, if you launch an Archinaut into low Earth orbit, it'll be able to build things while zipping around the Earth at 28,000 km/h. For the spacecraft, it'll feel like it's in zero gravity.
Great video Fraser. Kinds ties into a question i asked in an earlier video about 3D printing objects on the moon, very interesting topic. Definitely think it will be a huge thing in the future.
It's really the key to becoming a space faring civilization.
That, and when we get to produce fuel in space!
Just need to find the water, and power to split it up.
Sorry, this will be off topic. What form a singularity, is still consider matter? If so can it be a single element?
You mean like a black hole singularity? We don't know what it's made of, we can only measure its mass and spin.
Fraiser, Love the channel and appreciate all that you do. Quick question, considering the current global dust storm on Mars, what contingency plans do NASA have in place for the InSight mission should there be another one in November?
I don't think they have contingency plans, they're just hoping that it's not happening then.
I guess there's not a lot they could do about it. It's not like they can orbit the planet and wait it out.
Are there any projects in the planning stages to replace the International Space Station that you're aware of? And are we capable of a more "Clarkian type" which is to say rotating station?
The next station in the works will be the Deep Space Gateway, and they're considering a rotating module on it to provide some artificial gravity. ua-cam.com/video/xFs1EzRb--Y/v-deo.html&list=PLbJ42wpShvml6Eg22WjWAR-6QUufHFh2v&index=33
Excellent summary! Thank you!
Thanks for watching!
3-D printing structures with regolith and magnesium oxide and binder isn't the long term solution unless the magnesium oxide and binder can be manufactured using materials from the moon. The prospector style missions make sense at this point so they can find out what minerals are where. It would make sense to build the first moon bases on or near minerals that can be processed into something that can be turned into structures without the addition of any materials from earth. As a very crude example, nickel-iron powder could be separated from regolith by magnets then solar powered 3-D printing could melt the metal into those hollow bird-bone-like structures and the cavities filled with some of the sifted and metal-depleted regolith you extracted the metal from. You're going to process a lot of regolith to extract usable amounts of metal, so it would be good to design mining machines that can be 3-D printed with whatever quality of metal you can produce from regolith. These machines should require a minimum amount of machined parts. Then you need to make the machine shop tools to machine the parts for your mining machines, and you want all or nearly all of this made from lunar materials. The good news is that there will be a lot of jobs that need doing in a moon base, lots of stuff gets made and an off-earth economy can grow rapidly using in-situ materials. The bad news is that there is a huge amount of infrastructure needed for the minimum-size self-supporting bootstrap starter colony.
Figuring out the minimum toolset that needs to come from earth to mine raw materials and process it into everything you need to build all the shelters, all the machinery, and grow all the food for everyone is a much tougher and more interesting problem than adding binders brought from earth to whatever dirt you find there. Even if your shelter is only one percent binder, you'd need huge amounts of it shipped up from earth to fill a never-ending need. Kickstarting a true off-world economy is a much more worthy goal. There would be many opportunities for innovation in manufacturing all the little things that can't initially be made there. I can imagine a time when machine tools like lathes and milling machines are made from lunar materials but the actual hardened cutters are not. Those cutting edges (like the carbide tips on a saw blade) brought from earth would be so expensive, there would be a huge incentive for anyone who can find a way to make them from local materials. This would be true of absolutely everything in the base.
This is why we need to get to places like the Moon and start testing out our techniques. We don't know which methods are going to work best with in situ resources and which will require large amounts of imported tech from Earth.
Yup, agree. 3D printing alone can't shorten the supply chain to the point that where won't be the need for the huge infrastructure.
One of the best and most interesting videos! Congrats! Please make more videos about it.
Any idea how much of the James Webb observation calendar is already filled up?
What's the test object to see if it's up and running?
And who gets (or already has) the first real slot of observation time, or what might it be used for?
Any idea when they're going to go for a 10-day deep field type image?
They haven't completed the first call for proposals yet, you've got until 2019 to get your first request in: jwst-docs.stsci.edu/display/JSP/James+Webb+Space+Telescope+Call+for+Proposals+for+Cycle+1
We have been researchg the supply-chain for space resources operations, it's "there" but half still has to be developed, e.g. new niche startups focussing on lunar surface and asteroid inspection, sampling, extraction etc. You can keep in contact with us to find out more.
We're just at the beginning of this, but I think the future will be all about space-based resource extraction and manufacturing. Some day rockets will barely ever launch from Earth because there's so much already out in space.
@@frasercain Two words when it comes to manufacturing even fairly low technology: supply chain. Very, very long supply chains that you can't just vanish away by saying "3D printing". To be able to many of the complex things we have without input from Earth (massive, ridiculously costly input from Earth) we need many long chains of facilities, with many people to maintain it. There's a reason our planet is dotted with large industrial constructions. Even leaving out the simple structural materials you could more easily create, ultimately you need to launch a city from Earth if you want to create a city in space, 'cos a city is what you need for a broad industrial base - a city of large complex machines in huge variety.
@@andrewgoodall2183 I agree that lots of stuff is needed, and the ideal situation is lots of different materials being simultaneously and independently produced in space, but I think we must bear in mind we are on the cusp of a major revolution in AI capability, which will be mediated by the advent of cheap high density & low power neuromorphic circuitry, which will get us spectacular increases in Ai, and thence robotic capability. I envision robotically managed off-planet projects, guided remotely but not micro-managed, from earth. Consider, a competent robot needs no material food, air nor water, just reliable mechanics and solar power. I expect that before we have a substantial human presence off-planet, we will have pretty much attained a critical mass of robotic industry there to support our arrival. I anticipate this century (barring excessive earthside stupidity) will comprise the projects to put us in that position. This will prove much cheaper and easier than trying to do it with local human presence.
Thank you again for all the videos (im currently on catch up with them)
Thanks, this should keep you busy for a while. :-)
It may be easier to construct dome like structures like the millennium dome. Given that these structures May easily enclose larger areas allowing construction to take place inside.
Absolutely. Geodesic domes are one of the best shapes to construct strong buildings.
Fraser would it be feasible to collect and recycle the space junk that is in orbit? It would solve 2 problems at one stroke.
Also what is the name of that institution Wochester? Where is it based? I can't find any reference to it.
Idk, but it's probably "Worcester," pronounced "Wooster" or "Wusta." (Blame England.)
I'm six-sigma sure you're picking on Fraser for his mispronounciation 😊 but if not then here is the article: www.wpi.edu/news/paulrobot
Thanks please see the link inthe other reply here.
It's spelled Worchester. Sadly NASA stopped running the regolith challenges. :-(
Thanks if you see a previous answer from Rich Wilson he sent me a link so that I could see the report.
If I own a company, and am able to mine an asteroid, can I say, "this asteroid is mine?"
No, but everything you mine is yours.
Especially if you say it in a Mario Italian accent: "This-a asteroid is-a mine!"
sweet avatar hey
Of course.. Until someone else lands there to evict you and take it, its 100% yours. 😂
No, the laws are archaic, but they'll change as soon as someone wants an asteroid.
Hey Fraser, question:
Saw a picture of the mars rovers tires. Why couldnt they just use normal rubber tires?
Guess there has to be a point somewhere.
Rubber would get too brittle in the cold surface of Mars.
awesome video as always !
keep it up ! :)
Thanks!
Thank you for this amazing video.
I have one question.
Theoretically, upto how many stages can we integrate into a rocket and what are the main constraining factors to this limit?
There's no real limit, and I've heard of ideas for 4 and 5 stage rockets, but at a certain point, your fuel tanks are too small and the weight of the rockets are too big. Also, the engines are the most expensive part of the rocket, so costs come into play.
What about fission material like Uranium for energy production?
Great videos, love what you do! Any chance you could share what music is playing in the video?
I'll get Chad to post links to the audio that we're using.
Have to do a concept art of a mining station on mars. This was so helpful. Thanks for the detailed explanation :D
Oh great, let me know how the project works out.
Best episode in a while .Super interesting. I'll be certainly waiting for more on the subject! The part about becoming a true solar system civilization reminded me of xkcd's "Newton's Trajectories" ^_^
Thanks a lot, I'm glad you enjoyed it. This was a pretty tough one to pull together. :-)
Great video Fraser.
I agree, it makes a lot of sense to think that economic incentive might be what will ultimately drive us to build off world or create zero G industries.
In my opinion, that's what it's going to take to really unlock us as a true space-faring civilization.
Hi Fraser. Are solar panels that are manufactured here on Earth specifically designed for the solar radiation coming from the sun, or would they work on a spacecraft visiting another star once it gets there?
Sure, they'd work with any star.
How much human intervention would be needed at first for these 3D printing ventures? How will issues with a build be resolved in an efficient manner?
In theory these things would be automated. If they're on the Moon, they can be remote controlled by astronauts.
You mention that there is a propulsion system which would mine water from a comet. Would this cause problems for other high speed travel through the solar system which would then encounter the water exhaust? I guess more generally, is there a problem with any exhaust material creating clouds which would not settle into gravity wells or automatically clump?
Aaron Day No, the water exhaust would be comparatively low velocity, and would spread like a gas in the vacuum. It would essentially vanish as soon as it left the rocket.
Talk about steampunk, though...
Not really, I can't imagine how this would be a problem. The solar wind is constantly blowing and would push any water out into deep space.
That oxygen plant concept was interesting. If it could produce food or building materials photosynthesis might be made obsolete.
Wow... Fantastic!
Pretty cool stuff in the works.
"Woo-ster". Not "Wor-ches-ter". Accents are strange, but it's their city, so...
Yeah, I'm sure there's a blooper reel coming where I panic and realize I pronounced it wrong. And then Googled to try and figure it out.
Oh no, I forgot to keep the right one!
Oops.
Fraser, If we ever created a Dyson swarm or sphere, what would the effect of preventing all that solar radiation from radiating be on the planets? Especially those further out. Would the added mass effect the gravitational force of the sun?
James Aberson even with a massive swarm we could still allow the sun's radiation to reach the planets, from what I understand a Dyson sphere isn't as viable of an option as a swarm since keeping such a massive structure rigidly intact completely around the sun is probably more work than it's worth. In stead a swarm of independently adjustable and moveable pieces seems like a more reasonable project to pursue. As far as gravitational effects I would assume it'd be so negligible that it couldn't really influence such large bodies like planets or even comets/asteroids.
Petite Bourgeoisie Thanks! I'm not smart enough to think these ideas up on my own. I just repeat what I've heard from many other people who are far smarter than I am, they just explain it in a way that I can understand thankfully.
A Dyson swarm wouldn't be opaque until it was ginormously enormous. Not an immediate concern.
If it ever becomes a problem, you could arrange for the swarm elements to tilt / open up to let 100% of the usual light to hit the planets.
The mass to make the swarm would presumably be taken from objects inside the solar system, so there's no difference as far as the sun is concerned. (The mass of everything else in the system combined is like ~1% of the sun's mass. The Earth is a speck of dust.)
(Dyson spheres are unnecessary madness. Swarms are better.)
Twirlip Of The Mists "~1% of the sun's mass"... the breakdown of mass in our solar system is 99.85% is the sun, .15% is everything else. Of everything else Jupiter is more than two-thirds of it. Everything else (Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Earth, Venus, Mars, Mercury, Pluto, Kuiper belt objects, asteroids, comets, etc) make up less than .05%.
Anything that got blocked would receive less illumination from the Sun and cool down. Obviously you'd want to put your Dyson Swarm just behind the Earth so it still gets as much radiation as possible without blocking the Earth.
Off topic how much faster would space shot be if launch from a rail gun ? Could the sail open in flight .
It could provide a good speed boost, but it's hard to beat the speed of light.
While regolith is fine, I am working a methods to be able to drill and mine on Moon/Mars. Most common drilling methods require the weight of the drill string to "push" into the earth. That won't work very well at 1/6th gravity. And hauling a lot of drill pipe to the moon seems very expensive and impractical.
There are so many little details that need to be figured out.
i have a question for your questions show: why are solar systems flat? why are there not planets orbiting at extreme inclinations such as 45+ degrees?
RulesOfImgur I may be wrong here, but I believe the Sun itself rotates.
Conservation of angular momentum, plus gravitational (and occasionally mechanical) interactions between all the particles and bodies in the system. Same as galaxies.
Something orbiting outside the plane gets tugged toward the plane until it settles nicely into the plane.
There are videos on UA-cam about it.
There are some objects with eccentric or even reverse orbits. Some of them are probably recent captured that haven't had time to settle in.
Anon B The sun does rotate, but the Sun's rotation isn't an important factor in making the other stuff rotate or revolve, or in forming the orbital plane.
Then a solar nebula collapses down it starts to spin faster and faster into a flattened disk. The planets form out of the disk of material.
In the near term, all we would want in space would be rocket fuel - which is basically water.
Some day we'll get nearly all our resources from space, and do nearly all our industry and agriculture in space.
Yeah, doing this research got me pretty excited about where it's all going.
Is there a way to protect non-earth construction projects (ie, landing pads, roads, etc)? I can see us building one, only for an asteroid to take it out.
Not really, that'll be a constant risk. :-(
Great stuff Fraser,from planet Hornby
Hi Steve! I know that planet. :-)
Tim Allen!?
Other people can have that name.
Wow! This maybe the most important tech in space. I want to know more, especially those projects that coming up in the near-term. Does anybody what the Chinese are doing in this area?
The Chinese just launched a mission to the far side of the Moon, and they're sending another rover there soon. The Chinese are seriously interested in exploring the Moon.
In a hundred years we will have space robots developing space so we can enjoy the infrastructure in space, on asteroids etc, even O'Neil Cylinders (look that up). And in a hundred years it could end up costing nothing cos the robots could reproduce themselves and build tools etc. and 3D print stuff, all for no cost. And the moneyless "space economy" could be completely separate to the world economy. If we tried to use humans to develop space and make stuff like O'Neil Cylinders, it would simply be cost prohibitive. It would cost more than the world economy is worth. It will only happen if it's free or it won't happen (that simple). And if it did, it would only be on an extremely tiny scale (and no O'Neil cylinders).
Great video^^
Maybe it's the right time to found a space startup
The first trillionaire will be someone running a space mining company.
Good content, coming here from Isaac Arthur. ☺️
Thanks, welcome!
Other similar videos about colonizing planets were giving us a story book but frazer is giving us a blueprint, a mission sheetplan, a manual book, u name it the actual stuff.
What do you think of the idea of making the first base at Mars being a refueling depot on Deimos or Phobos have you heard anything about this?
#8thcomment
I think it makes a lot of sense. Easier to get too and from than Mars.
How about a video on Sedna and how the Sun can still have gravitational influence at it aphelion of 937 AU.
Gravity can reach across billions of light years. Our Solar System has objects 2 light years away. So Sedna is no problem. 😀
Question. If the moon's far side has had the majority of impacts, couldn't we find lots of minerals etc there for the moon colony? Millions of years of asteroid collisions must have left a lot of debris.
Mineral resources will be everywhere on the Moon. What's in short supply is water. A very small amount of water may have collected in the sunless craters at the Moon's poles but the rest has been cooked away by the sun. For significant colonization we need to wrangle a comet or go out past the snowline and haul in an icy object.
There would be all kinds of minerals all over the Moon, but it's going to be tough to dig down and get them. Easier to just collect small asteroids and break them apart for material.
Ahh, the Archinaut sent shivers down my spine, they do conceptually feel like space spiders enough to trigger my arachnophobia :) Super stoked about the idea though.. still think we need to heavily invest into alternative launch assist systems - even if BFR in it's ultimate form would be an order of magnitude cheaper than falcon heavy is - I would still need to pay almost $11.5k to ship me (on a very good day:) to space naked...
Once we get to the BFR it'll just be in the tens of thousands on $$.
That's still too much for the future I hope to live in. I'm talking about the future where I will ride the moon buggy over the craters outside the moon-spa and see the earthrise with my own eyes... that future requires at least one more order of magnitude decrease (better 1.5/2:) in price per kg to LEO
The BFR could get the cost down to about $75/kg, which isn't too bad. I'd be about $7500 to get into orbit. And then the space infrastructure can take over.
oh, that would make them 1.5 orders of magnitude lower than falcon heavy (I think i saw a $1700/kg to LEO in NASA's website for f-heavy:). Not bad!... still that last order of magnitude to drop it to $7.5/kg would unlock space for the rest of the world:)
3D printing in space should be more efficient as you could get away with less infill and remove the need support structure for more complicated shapes.
Yup, absolutely.
I've watched your episode of time dilation. So can we effect aging by altering velocity of time?? I mean in an inertial frame of reference.. I know we take time as base for every measurement because we cannot change time. We can only change the reference distance or whatever it is that can be measured or changed..
No, you can only experience less time than other people.
so its just relative to others.. so time cannot be speed up or slowed down. is that what u say?? How about braking the basic laws of physics
To put it another way, no matter what speed you travel, nor how deep the gravity well in which you stand, time to you (that is, your subjective rate at which time passes) does not appear to change. However, as we saw in the movie _Interstellar,_ your subjective hour spent deep in (for instance) a strong gravitational field might seem like years or decades to someone well outside that field floating in microgravity.
The watches on your respective wrists during this experiment will seem to tick at the same rate they always have, but when you both come back to the same place to compare, the fact that time has been passing differently will be clear because the two watches will show very different times, & you and your partner will have perceived different amounts of time as having passed.
Because of this, it is (at least, theoretically) possible for a human being travelling at (something like) 95% of light speed to travel to the edge of the observable universe within their own subjective lifetime: yes, the distance as observed from Earth is billions of light years, but the time dilation (the word for this stretching/compressing of time) at that high speed is so severe, that the time experienced on such a trip would only amount to several decades... time which for the traveler would seem to pass at a "normal" rate, even though the Earth & our solar system will (likely) have long since ceased to exist by the time the journey was complete.
R.Instro ...that was one hell of an explanation. Anyways thanks man
Nice work R.Instro. :-)
Hi Fraser , do You know how many black holes have been discovered just in our Milky Way Galaxy (other than just the super massive black hole) ? If so then where are they ? THanks Man , I found You from Your Open Space visits with John Michael Godier , then I found out that You also did one with Isaac Arthur and also Cody Reeder . I also think that We should "Practice" on the Moon before going to Mars for lots of reasons . I love Your videos and have binged on many of them over the past 3 days . Glad to know Your channel now , look forward to much more :) . Take Care .
Thanks Kyle, I don't know how many have been discovered, but there are a lot. I heard recently that astronomers found a swarm of them orbiting around that central Milky Way SMBH. Sounds like you've found a lot of great channels. I like those guys. :-)
Ok , Thank You Fraser , now I at least know that there's alot of them , because no one ever talks about them and their distribution . I already knew about those channels (that's how I found You) but I absolutely love that We all know each other , The YT science community :) . Take Care and thank You for replying :)
QUESTION
The gravity is property of curvature of space time right? The closer you get to the cruve the more gravity you get right? Gravity is not like magnetic attraction right? the how the hell they say that the gravity is zero in the middle of earth?
Because you're being pulled equally in all directions. So it feels like zero gravity.
This is all so damn awesome!!!
Agreed.
gotta smack dat like button harder than the platinum core of a 800 meter metal rich asteroid
That's pretty hard. :-)
Hi Fraser. Have been listening to your episodes for over 2 years but never left a comment. Maybe it's me but it seems like you increased the pauses between your sentences this time. If so, I really do prefer the previous pace as it feels like it slows down the video right now. Keep up the amazing work and looking forward for your next upload!
Thanks Timo, one thing that we've been experimenting with is trying to have more pauses in the video, where there's just cool graphics on the screen, so it's not just me rambling non-stop through the video. But we'll keep on working on it, to make it all come together.
Fraser Cain - you are not rambling Mr Fraser, you are actually among the ones easy to understand, but to adjust the speed and/or to be avare of the importance is good, not too slow and not too fast
I've been a fan since Astronomy Cast. (Is "since 2005" possible?) And I'm sure I comment too much.
No real complaints, but I thought the pauses here were a wee bit distracting / jarring. (I know it was for the video.)
(TBH I find most imagery and video distracting unless it's directly relevant and instructive. Not because I dont like images, but because they're seldom relevant or instructive. Not just this channel - it's been true of the whole 21st century imho.)
We try to make the graphics and videos as directly connected to what I'm saying as possible. There are a lot of videos out there that just play audio and put totally unrelated graphics on the screen. We're trying to learn how to make the best possible videos we can, and that means experimenting, and that means failing... all the time.
Random question I have after watching Isaac Arthur's Newest Video: Post-Scarcity and Purpose. He mentioned Humanity doing anything to make sure we felt like we had a purpose, with also colonizing other Star Systems being one of the many purposes. I then remembered you saying that we would have robots doing that for us. So, after all that stuff, my question: Why do you believe that Humanity wouldn't try colonizing other Star Systems. I'm not saying all, just the few that think it's their purpose in their lives to try and colonize a new planet for Humanity.
P.S. Sorry for such the long question.
I think that humanity will send robotic spacecraft to other stars to explore the Milky Way, but it's so difficult to get anywhere else in the galaxy, I think we're starting to appreciate how amazing the Earth is.
Fraser Cain Earth is great. Yet we've decided to use damaging energy sources even when we know they're bad.
And that's why we need to get all this stuff off Earth. Let it go back to being the best place in the Universe.
How life is difrent on other planets?
We don't know of any other planets with life, so right now, we have no idea what it might be like.
Fraser Cain ok any idea what migh look like?
This is what I was hoping would happen. :)
Happy to deliver.
how long do you thinck it will tacke to populate the monn?
I'm not sure we'll ever have a big population on the Moon. Just a research station.
@@frasercain I would be surprised if 500 years from now the moon doesn't have several million inhabitants. The moon will go through a boom period when it is the industrial and transportation hub of the solar system - first stop for outgoing earthlings, first major X-T (extra-terrestrial ie off-earth) manufacturing centre for all the major solar system infrastructure - spacecraft, solar power, etc. and consequently first major X-T population centre, with human support - agriculture, commerce, social structure etc. It will also be supporting some of the first really major X-T big science - the inevitably mentioned mammoth telescopes, but also globe circling particle accelerator (with far better beam vacuum than available on earth, and of course huge amounts of power for the
taking), and lots of projects that couldn't be contemplated on planets with an ecosystem to worry about.
The focus of emigration will expand outward, but there is a social dynamic to consider - the descendants of the first settlers will have a particular attachment to the soil of the species most audacious colonization, not to mention a certain degree of inherent prestige, and the environment will be steadily enhanced to the point of being a paradise, so no sacrifice of earthly pleasures, plus the gravity bonus, and the spectacular view. I imagine they will wear the moniker of lunatic with great pride.
I like the concept, however what stops us from accidentally wiping out possible life forms?
This is why we have to be really careful when we explore other worlds, to make sure there aren't already lifeforms there that we could be messing with.
Planetary Resources, didnt they close down?
Is there a limit to how much gravity assist can we get from a black hole?
Theoretically up to the speed of light, but practically, you'd tear your spaceship apart at some point.
We could develop robots that could build stuff in space and on the moon and Mars etc. (like labs, hotels, telescopes and life support stuff). Humans could then go to space (in luxury) instead of the high cost of initial human space exploration and bringing along those depressing inflatable pods… and nothing else to go to except dry cold barren land. Robots don't need food, pay, temp control, oxygen, sleep, the list goes on, on how much more efficient robots could be (doing stuff in space instead of humans). Then when its complete humans would go (and there would be actually something to go to).
Yeah, exactly, let the robots build up all the infrastructure, and then all you have to take to orbit is the humans.
I made that RANT up recently before I saw this video (that basically says the same thing) and I was really excited to see someone on UA-cam with the same passion, so I had to lay it on you. Well done!
Something I have always wondered is, why "in situ" and not "on site"?
That's what the translated latin means. I guess those technical terms last sometimes.
Want to see more
We're working on space navigation next week.
My idea to improve Mars is to guide selected asteroids to Mars where they would 1, warm the planet 2, provide raw materials for manufacturing 3, add mass to the planet thereby increasing Mars' gravity (which would be better for earthlings).
The problem is that hitting Mars would asteroids would turn the surface into molten rock, which would then need hundreds of years to cool back down.
i have pressed the subcribe button and taped the 🔔
Thanks! Enjoy the videos.
Imagine, staring dispassionately at the narrators face as he reads his lines. I can imagine nothing so absolutely captivating.
My face?
Is a black hole an object or a reigon in space?
It's a region where matter and energy are compressed so densely that the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light. But it used to be a star before it died, so... both?
Ive always thought the plan to build a space ship inside a huge nickel iron asteroid would be cool.
But
What if you flew a robot manufacturing plant to an asteroid made out of just loosely bound regolith and rocks, and used a binding agent like glue, or heat even, to turn the asteroid into the basis of a space cement?
Then you could 3D print the space cement into any shape you needed.
A skeleton for a solar array, or the outer shell of a habitat.
Then you could add to your space platform by collecting more asteroids and processing them.
We need to test out different techniques to figure out what works best.
Hey Fraser, I love your channel. Question: If we ever figure out the technical difficulties of interstellar travel, do you think humans can overcome the psychological challenges? And if we could, if a person arrives at the destination, generations later, how much would he be different from a human on earth? Can we still call him a human, considering he's not born here? Thanks very much! Seven.
I bet someone once said, "if mankind ever flies, how will they overcome..."
The second guy to do it will find it boringly normal, is my guess.
Sure, I think that the psychological issues are the least of the challenges. Humans have learned to live in these kinds of environments in the past.