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Hypx ,
@Hypx@kbin.social avatar

Ernest has not been seen in a while. So no, there's basically no admin currently available.

Hard Science Futurism: What types of theoretical prefabricated materials would the first stellar generation ship carry to construct an O'Neil cylinder upon arrival?

Assuming we are talking about an era when Sol has a thriving space industry and the Solar system is broadly colonized. Current materials science supports structures up to 8 kilometers in diameter, and if large scale graphene production is possible, up to 100km in diameter, at least according to Isaac Arthor....

Hypx ,
@Hypx@kbin.social avatar

The cheapest materials would be what can be acquired in space without having to launch from Earth. As a result, you're going to want to build your O'Neill cylinder out of some combination of iron, aluminum, titanium, and silicon dioxide.

The last of which might be particularly useful, as it is the main ingredient of fiberglass while also being the most common substance on Moon and asteroids. As a result, you probably want to build your cylinder primarily out of fiberglass. You can get pretty decently sized cylinders, as fiberglass has a higher strength-to-weight ratio than steel. Apparently, 24km diameter is a viable figure. Scale up length the same way, and you'll get 96km. So a 24km x 96km O'Neill cylinder made out of fiberglass.

That would be about 7238 km^2 of usable surface area. Half that to 3619 km^2 to make room for windows (as originally envisioned by O'Neill), and assuming a density comparable to New York City (about 11,300 people/km^2), you'll get around 40 million people. Or about the population of Tokyo.

That's seems plenty for any sensible space colonization strategy we might adopt in the future. And what's best is that you don't really need any fancy technology. Just use solar power to power mass drivers and deliver raw materials from the moon or asteroid via electricity. And it won't be any special materials either. Raw regolith can be made into fiberglass, so cost can be kept surprisingly low. The only question is scaling it all up, which may unfortunately be too expensive or will take a very long time to happen. Ultimately, this is still sci-fi, albeit on the hard side of it, since no fancy new technology is require.

Hypx ,
@Hypx@kbin.social avatar

This is sci-fi stuff. No one is seriously saying we could build this anytime soon. It will require a radical advancement in space travel capability. But the interesting part of this is that it doesn’t any new technology. It needs only the technology that we currently have, just scaled up massively.

As it is an O’Neill cylinder, the raw material needs will be truly huge. We’re literally building a city on the scale of Tokyo but in space. So we are just assuming that someday, we can move around that amount of stuff in space.

Hypx ,
@Hypx@kbin.social avatar

Yes, that's the point. It's far beyond the actual city of Tokyo in terms of construction difficulty and scale. But it doesn't need any new technologies to be invented to be doable. Just the ability to build on that scale.

Hypx ,
@Hypx@kbin.social avatar

Then you'll have to deal with Lunar gravity, which may be unacceptable for long durations. Humans may have to live in giant space stations if we want to live in space. And since they can be truly massive, it may be more desirable than what some might think.

Hypx ,
@Hypx@kbin.social avatar

The claimed figures are arguably too clean. Wouldn't be surprising if it was a bad/fake poll. If 1/5 of young people were really Holocaust deniers, we'd absolutely hear about those types of people all the time.

Hypx ,
@Hypx@kbin.social avatar

Kbin is about 3 months old whereas Lemmy is about 3 years old. Kbin simply wasn't ready for growth, and still has a few major feature shortfalls. Lack of API access is a big one.

How come there is very little Kbin SEO for individual posts? Also, what are tags/badges? ( kbin.social )

Maybe someone smarter than me can explain things, but It's been about a month since I've started the process of creating a magazine to support the reddit/discord community I've helped mod for the past 4 years... but I've noticed that zero posts show up in google search....

Hypx ,
@Hypx@kbin.social avatar

@fearout It just occurred to me that all you need is your own server and you just need to index that server only. It basically gets data from all other instances through the standard activityPub protocol. It works differently than traditional crawlers, but the outcome is the same.

The AD-BASED internet is DYING, and it's getting WORSE in the process ( tilvids.com )

Google has shown that with enough scale, just running ads on a website is enough to keep the content free of charge. But of course, as with everything where money is involved, it went way too far. This limited the ad revenue, and so websites decided to add more ads....

Hypx ,
@Hypx@kbin.social avatar

It's truly amazing. Even people who knew that Reddit was destined to fail someday, wouldn't have predict it happening so fast.

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