If you think that “humans will be living on Mars and O’Neill cylinders 30 years from now”, then you probably haven’t tried to calculate whether that’s actually economically feasible and whether it’s practical to get to Mars and live there:
12km is the maximum length that a steel cable can support its own mass at Earth surface gravity. If it is any longer, it will snap under its own weight.
O’Neill Cylinders will never be economically feasible to build. If we built an O’Neill Cylinder that’s 10km long and 6.4 km in diameter, with a 1m thick hull, then it would weigh 3 trillion kg (2 trillion kg of steel, with 1 trillion kg of material).
Putting 1 kg into LEO varies between $50,000 and $1,500. The lowest cost being the Falcon Heavy from SpaceX, but with only 3 completed launches, this is a somewhat optimistic estimate.
So, if we assume a cost of $1000/kg, then putting a 3 trillion kg cylinder into LEO would cost $3 quadrillion ($3,000,000,000,000,000), and that’s only for one cylinder.
For comparison, the world’s nominal GDP is less than 100 trillion dollars.
And that’s only the cost to put an O’Neil Cylinder in Low-Earth Orbit. If we had to send an O’Neil Cylinder to Mars (or something that’s comparable for sustaining human life), then the costs for space travel get exponentially worse than that due to the Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation.
For more information, I recommend reading Futurist Fantasies by T. K. Van Allen. The book packs an impressive amount of information into just 100 pages.
in which case the fundamental Georgist argument of “you can’t make more land” isn’t true.
It is true. You can’t make more land. Humans still must obey the laws of physics, whether we like it or not. Both the Moon and Mars are absolutely horrible places for any human to live, so humanity has nothing to gain from trying to live outside the Earth.
Now, I already showed my calculations for why I believe it’s far too expensive to try that. I didn’t even go over all the physical challenges that would make it virtually impossible. My judgment is that space colonization won’t be possible for several decades, possibly longer, and probably never. It will probably take many people and many LessWrongers a while to reach similar conclusions.
In the 1960s, people thought that Humanity would’ve achieved the technological advancements in 2001: A Space Odyssey two decades ago, and that still hasn’t happen by now. People need to recognize that technological process has clearly slowed down, and we’ve nearly reached its limits.
Another misconception that’s worth clarifying is that the value of land matters more than the supply of land. There’s obvious reasons why lots in Manhattan are worth more than acres in the Sahara Desert.
It seems like you can get 90% of the benefit of Georgism just by going full YIMBY and you don’t have to wait 30 years to do it.
No, that’s a huge oversimplification, and it’s much more complicated than that. Any society would have to wait at least a few decades to transition to Georgism, but then the benefits will become progressive and compounding. I recommend reading Georgism Crash Course for a concise introduction.
If it will take at least 30 years to transition to Georgism because otherwise we screw over most people who have >50% of their net worth invested in their homes, then why bother?
Because we live in reality, not a sci-fi fantasy world where humans are invincible.
Even if humans could live on Mars, why would anyone want to live on Mars when you can live on Earth instead? Even Antarctica is a thousand times better than Mars. I will never understand why people fantasize about colonizing Mars when humans haven’t even colonized Antarctica.
This was a surprisingly ignorant comment by T. K. Van Allen, given that O’Neill was a physicist and included all his calculations. I suspect Van Allen never actually read the ‘Steel structure’ math in O’Neill’s essay The Colonization of Space. The rest of Van Allen’s bullet points also seem ignorant of O’Neill’s calculations further down in the essay. I don’t disagree with the bottomline that the cost is prohibitive, I just wished Van Allen engaged with O’Neill’s math.
The square/cube isn’t really relevant to the O’Neill cylinder itself, but it is relevant when considering what kinds of space infrastructure could be created to launch the cylinder or its components into space.
I agree with the reasoning that he stated in the book regarding this topic.
I think he’s right about the maximum length of steel cables at Earth surface gravity.
Granted, space would have much weaker gravity, so assembling an O’Neil cylinder in space and having it never land on any planets could make this a non-issue.
Also, the bullet points are my attempt to summarize what he wrote.
They’re not what he actually wrote.
But the first chapter of Van Allen’s book is free to read on Amazon as a sample if you’d like, and it includes everything that I was trying to summarize.
Nevertheless, you’re probably right that he didn’t read the math in O’Neill’s essay.
Thank you for sharing the link.
If you think that “humans will be living on Mars and O’Neill cylinders 30 years from now”, then you probably haven’t tried to calculate whether that’s actually economically feasible and whether it’s practical to get to Mars and live there:
The Square/Cube Law makes it physically impossible to build megastructures like space elevators, mass drivers, orbital rings, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law
12km is the maximum length that a steel cable can support its own mass at Earth surface gravity. If it is any longer, it will snap under its own weight.
O’Neill Cylinders will never be economically feasible to build. If we built an O’Neill Cylinder that’s 10km long and 6.4 km in diameter, with a 1m thick hull, then it would weigh 3 trillion kg (2 trillion kg of steel, with 1 trillion kg of material).
Putting 1 kg into LEO varies between $50,000 and $1,500. The lowest cost being the Falcon Heavy from SpaceX, but with only 3 completed launches, this is a somewhat optimistic estimate.
So, if we assume a cost of $1000/kg, then putting a 3 trillion kg cylinder into LEO would cost $3 quadrillion ($3,000,000,000,000,000), and that’s only for one cylinder.
For comparison, the world’s nominal GDP is less than 100 trillion dollars.
And that’s only the cost to put an O’Neil Cylinder in Low-Earth Orbit. If we had to send an O’Neil Cylinder to Mars (or something that’s comparable for sustaining human life), then the costs for space travel get exponentially worse than that due to the Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation.
For more information, I recommend reading Futurist Fantasies by T. K. Van Allen. The book packs an impressive amount of information into just 100 pages.
It is true. You can’t make more land. Humans still must obey the laws of physics, whether we like it or not. Both the Moon and Mars are absolutely horrible places for any human to live, so humanity has nothing to gain from trying to live outside the Earth.
Now, I already showed my calculations for why I believe it’s far too expensive to try that. I didn’t even go over all the physical challenges that would make it virtually impossible. My judgment is that space colonization won’t be possible for several decades, possibly longer, and probably never. It will probably take many people and many LessWrongers a while to reach similar conclusions.
In the 1960s, people thought that Humanity would’ve achieved the technological advancements in 2001: A Space Odyssey two decades ago, and that still hasn’t happen by now. People need to recognize that technological process has clearly slowed down, and we’ve nearly reached its limits.
Another misconception that’s worth clarifying is that the value of land matters more than the supply of land. There’s obvious reasons why lots in Manhattan are worth more than acres in the Sahara Desert.
No, that’s a huge oversimplification, and it’s much more complicated than that. Any society would have to wait at least a few decades to transition to Georgism, but then the benefits will become progressive and compounding. I recommend reading Georgism Crash Course for a concise introduction.
Because we live in reality, not a sci-fi fantasy world where humans are invincible.
Even if humans could live on Mars, why would anyone want to live on Mars when you can live on Earth instead? Even Antarctica is a thousand times better than Mars. I will never understand why people fantasize about colonizing Mars when humans haven’t even colonized Antarctica.
This was a surprisingly ignorant comment by T. K. Van Allen, given that O’Neill was a physicist and included all his calculations. I suspect Van Allen never actually read the ‘Steel structure’ math in O’Neill’s essay The Colonization of Space. The rest of Van Allen’s bullet points also seem ignorant of O’Neill’s calculations further down in the essay. I don’t disagree with the bottomline that the cost is prohibitive, I just wished Van Allen engaged with O’Neill’s math.
The square/cube isn’t really relevant to the O’Neill cylinder itself, but it is relevant when considering what kinds of space infrastructure could be created to launch the cylinder or its components into space. I agree with the reasoning that he stated in the book regarding this topic.
I think he’s right about the maximum length of steel cables at Earth surface gravity. Granted, space would have much weaker gravity, so assembling an O’Neil cylinder in space and having it never land on any planets could make this a non-issue.
Also, the bullet points are my attempt to summarize what he wrote. They’re not what he actually wrote. But the first chapter of Van Allen’s book is free to read on Amazon as a sample if you’d like, and it includes everything that I was trying to summarize.
Nevertheless, you’re probably right that he didn’t read the math in O’Neill’s essay. Thank you for sharing the link.