You have not really succeeded in colonizing another place unless you can make all the essentials for continued life locally. This in turn has the limiting factor not just on biology, but how machinery wears out, ergo you need a way to manufacture all the critical machinery, and the machinery to make that machinery, and so on.
The solution to this ironically might allow you to bypass the issue entirely. If you have self-replicating industrial plants, why deal with all the hassles of a planet? Why not just export (using mass drivers) from the industrial plants on the surface the components for a decent orbital habitat?
The habitat would basically be one can inside another. In between the 2 cans is sand (mining tailings), 30-100m, enough to bring interior radiation doses to levels seen on earth.
Ribs on the inner can (think the hoops you see on a soup can) host maglev tracks. Riding the tracks are circular trains. Spun fast enough to reach 1 G if necessary. Angular momentum of the entire habitat is kept at zero, this is done by having half the trains drive the opposite way. (and there are transfer trains that let you move from one set to the other).
You can have all the trains stop (in coordination with each other) for maintenance.
Of course the easiest way to avoid the ‘kids are fragile’ issue is to not need such incredible numbers of them. If your colonists live for centuries and don’t just start decaying a mere decade or 2 after you are finished training them, you don’t have to have most of your colonists unproductively being in school or old-age care most of the their lives, you only need a tiny percentage of the population to be new children, individual colonists live long enough to actually earn the millions of (inflation adjusted) dollars a colonist seat in our near future will cost, and so on.
It occurs to me that our ancestors with their focus on the possibilities of space travel and colonization might have been missing the real problem...
You have not really succeeded in colonizing another place unless you can make all the essentials for continued life locally. This in turn has the limiting factor not just on biology, but how machinery wears out, ergo you need a way to manufacture all the critical machinery, and the machinery to make that machinery, and so on.
The solution to this ironically might allow you to bypass the issue entirely. If you have self-replicating industrial plants, why deal with all the hassles of a planet? Why not just export (using mass drivers) from the industrial plants on the surface the components for a decent orbital habitat?
The habitat would basically be one can inside another. In between the 2 cans is sand (mining tailings), 30-100m, enough to bring interior radiation doses to levels seen on earth.
Ribs on the inner can (think the hoops you see on a soup can) host maglev tracks. Riding the tracks are circular trains. Spun fast enough to reach 1 G if necessary. Angular momentum of the entire habitat is kept at zero, this is done by having half the trains drive the opposite way. (and there are transfer trains that let you move from one set to the other).
You can have all the trains stop (in coordination with each other) for maintenance.
Of course the easiest way to avoid the ‘kids are fragile’ issue is to not need such incredible numbers of them. If your colonists live for centuries and don’t just start decaying a mere decade or 2 after you are finished training them, you don’t have to have most of your colonists unproductively being in school or old-age care most of the their lives, you only need a tiny percentage of the population to be new children, individual colonists live long enough to actually earn the millions of (inflation adjusted) dollars a colonist seat in our near future will cost, and so on.
It occurs to me that our ancestors with their focus on the possibilities of space travel and colonization might have been missing the real problem...
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It’s oneil cylinders without the spun mass of the radiation shielding. Or wasted propellant during spin up—no propellant at all is used.
I’ve reached the same conclusion—it’s likely going to have to be asteroids, not planets.