Olgratin_Magmatoe @ Olgratin_Magmatoe @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Clever stuff. It’s basically a steerable continuous thrust system that tacks against sunlight.

Very clever, and very useful. Though probably not useful for this case. The solar pressure/wind will enact a constant normal force on the orbit of any craft at L1. So to maintain stable orbit (from my understanding) you will need to counteract that with a constant antinormal force, or else you’ll get pushed out of L1 and then go flying off.

I know on Earth you can sail more or less directly into the wind with a sail boat using clever geometry, but I'm not so sure that is possible when orbits are involved. That's the limit of my KSP based knowledge of orbital mechanics lol.

There’s also some untested methods that could potentially work here,

I have to disagree with the first two you listed. The electrodynamic tether would slow down the craft and knock it out of L1 orbit. If I'm understanding, it's the space equivalent of regenerative breaking. The magnetic sail would esentially have the same problem as the solar sail.

The bussard engine would definitely work, assuming the basic principle of the engine itself works. Though, I'm not sure if it would collect enough hydrogen when placed at L1. A very neat concept though, one I'd like to see happen!

Long short: RCS thrusters are probably still useful, but may not necessarily need to be the primary means of station keeping.

If we're using today's technology, they'd almost certainly be the primary means. But in this hypothetical future you may be right.

A nicer version of Steven King's langoliers.

People commonly burnout and run themselves ragged trying to make ends meet. I know I did.

If that's the case, then it sounds like people aren't getting paid. At least not a living, stable wage, which was sort of the implication.

And this may at least be in a very small part be a good thing, because it incentivises creators to switch to direct from creator purchases, which we're both in agreement is preferable.

CEO wages and capitalism doesn’t seem to care.

It still does seem to hurt them though. Because if it didn't in some way hurt them, then they wouldn't give a fuck about piracy.

Sure, the CEOs and execs just pass off potential lost revenue to buying users, but they can only do that to an extent. At a certain point, people are gonna say "fuck it, I don't care to pay $80/month for music, I'll switch to something else".

At a bare minimum, piracy is an ever present threat to their business model, that if they push too hard with prices, everybody is gonna ditch them for piracy. Because at the end of the day nobody has a pathological need for any particular media. And if someone really likes a particular type of media, they'll find some other way to get it without getting price gouged.

That’s the way forward.

I think we're in full agreement of this section here. Fuck the current system.

That's how I feel too. If it were to die, it gives more room for things like peertube to grow from its ashes.

hopefully they can be mostly solar powered, greatly extending fuel supply

That only works with ion thrusters, which are extremely expensive IIRC. But even they need fuel.

Most satellites that are that far out still use RCS thrusters with reaction wheels. But solar power only helps so much with that.

just send more. Actually, that’s the cost: routinely send more

That's gonna get costly very quickly. I doubt there is the political will to do this.

Engagement, huzzah!

Huzzah! Forewarning, I'm gonna be building off of your napkin math, because napkin rocket science math is fun.

it requires companies like SpaceX (or their competition as they come online) to get the launch prices down.

Absolutely. Given the scale of such a project like this, the price per launch would absolutely go down over time (assuming no bullshitery on SpaceX/other corporate entity's part.) Though your original price point of $10m/launch is a bit off. The Falcon Heavy for instance, costs roughly $60-90m depending on payload and destination, and whether or not the rocket is recovered.

Thus a 1km2 solar sail would weigh only 50kg (of sail material). Add another 200kg for some tensile frame and some control electronics and you’re looking at something like a Starlink mass to get 1km2.

Another way to get an estimate is to compare to a recent, modern launch. The JWST is a good comparison, especially since it is in a similar orbit/distance/mission. The whole thing weighs 6,500kg, with 350kg of that being the RCS/reaction wheels/comms/electronics/frame/etc all wrapped up in the spacecraft bus.

So a completed frame can reasonably have a payload of 6,150kg for solar umbrella activities. If we put 1/3rd of that into the umbrella frame and the rest into the umbrella material, that's 4100kg for sail material, or 82km². How you're gonna built an extendable frame that extends into a 9km x 9km sheet is a challenge, but maybe surmountable. This is a significantly bigger scale than the 1km² sats you've proposed, but if the weight allocation works with JWST something similar should work here. The solar pressure will increase the fuel needed to keep a stable orbit, but nothing that our pre-designed launch platform can't handle.

So that would be 731 of these JWST scale sats that need to be put into L1 orbit. JWST was launched with the Ariane 5, which costs $150-200m/launch. That's significantly more that then $10m/launch, but getting all the way out to L1 with a 6,500kg payload is hard. I wasn't able to find a cost associated with the JWST itself, only the development cost of ~$8.8 billion. But I'm gonna assume that the construction of the satellite itself was in the millions, if not billions. If it is even a single billion for just one of these, that's almost a trillion dollars for this project as a whole.

All of that for only a 0.1% reduction in sunlight. Not sure how much we need, but it seems small.

Okay, other options: we put the solar sails in a very high earth orbit (above the comms satellites) – doable, but you’ll require many many more of them as they won’t site between the Earth and the Sun during most of their orbit.

I have an even dumber, even more harmful, version of this that is just as fun to explore. Go up to the moon, build a couple rail launchers, and start launching shit loads of moon regolith into a high orbit around the earth, somewhere between geostationary orbit and lunar orbit. Eventually Earth will have it's own set of rings. We only launch everything for one week of the month every month to ensure the inclination of the rings stays somewhat uniform.

The benefit of this being once the infrastructure to do this is put on the moon, this can essentially run for free forever. We just have to be mindful of avoiding Earth's rings as we travel outside of our system.

Ironically, raising our albedo might be a decent local option – just mandate white roofs everywhere. Just under 3% of our surface is urban and white roofs would also help with the urban heat island issue. You can probably paint 0.2% of the surface white. Not as good as blocking sunlight, but useful. The bad part is, solar panels are all dark, and moving to solar decreases our albedo. So maybe this will just offset changes in our average albedo due to solar panels.

I think this is an almost guaranteed partial solution that we will end up doing. If you've traveled around at all, you'll notice that hotter climates tend to use white roofs, seemingly automatically. Home owners will automatically do whatever suits them for the climate, no matter how the climate changes. The problem here is so much of our buildings and infrastructure isn't roofs. So much of it is roads and parking. That's a lot harder to change the albedo.

A light nuclear winter sounds like a disaster – what do we do, nuke a few volcanoes to set them off prematurely? That doesn’t sound sustainable. Burn all the forests to release ash? Nope, that’s our carbon sink that’s burning…

Your last option reminds me of: Kill all the poor!

Yeah, these are the dumbest, most harmful solutions. But they're also probably the cheapest, which is why they're so scary. All it takes is one or two rogue states seeing this as a viable option, and it might end up happening.

I have like zero ability to determine when people are joking, and the internet only makes it worse :/

However, there are quasi-stable positions slightly sunward of L1 where you can balance these instabilities and actually use the solar sail effect for station keeping in a swarm. It would require launching a lot of rockets, but is entirely doable with today’s technology.

Not a scientist, but I'm still fascinated by this stuff.

The cost of that is going to be the big issue. No government is going to want to pay for routine shipments of fuel and parts to L1, which is expensive as hell. And I wouldn't bet on international cooperation being a thing either. Each country is going to be too busy fighting over food and water, and keeping migration at bay.

Completely guessing here, it would probably be cheaper to raise the albedo of the planet through various means. Maybe including massive scale cloud seeding over the oceans. At least it's on planet and therefore hypothetically can be done with minimal fossil fuel use. How to do that without fucking up the environment with chemicals for cloud nuclei is the hard part.

That, or intentionally inducing a light nuclear winter, ideally without the nuclear part. With enough particulates in the upper atmosphere, it would do the job. The tricky part is doing that without overdoing it. This is the dumb version, but it's personally how I see things going. Especially because this is something a lone country could probably do on its own. China doesn't want to deal with all the effects of climate change? They may light up a bunch of islands in the Pacific with nukes to "solve" it.

Another dumb option that might arise, a country intentionally trying to start another global pandemic to reduce emissions. Emissions dropped dlike a rock with COVID, and a lot of countries have the ability to produce bioweapons.

There are myriad of dumb, harmful, cheap ways that individual countries could use to curb climate change. The next few decades are going to be dangerous as hell.

IIRC he passed up a full ride of chemo treatment, and his family getting taken care of by his rich friend all to serve his ego.

"We got caught by the public, and we want to keep this excuse possible in the future. So we're dropping it from now so the court doesn't set a legal precedent that will fuck us over."

Seconded. Just give me sci-fi, that's all I want.

Trump and his cultists are gearing up to call the upcoming election rigged, similar to how they called the previous election rigged.

You're not wrong.

That's what you get when fox news spouts outright lies and deception 24/7, when facebook controls the algorithm and gives zero fucks about content moderation, when campaigns are able to spend millions on attack ads, etc.

The U.S. election system is a joke.

There is another group of users asking basically the same question over in this thread:

https://lemmy.world/post/18757036

It's definitely odd at a minimum.

It is truly maddening, and OP isn't helping. So I'm quite happy to hear somebody who share the sentiments you've given. Take care, it's gonna be a long election.

If it is at all helpful, you're not alone in your anger towards the system. You're 100% correct. This is shit we should have move on from 50 years ago.

I don’t believe in it, and that’s my opinion

It's also some people's opinion that the moon landing was faked. Not all opinions are of equal merit. And yours in particular when it comes to the spoiler effect flies in the face of the evidence. That evidence being the evidence I literally just showed you.

The math shows it's true. You can bury your head in the sand if you like, but you can't make the rest of us join you. Accept it.

And if you continue this conversation with me, I will block you. Again.

Go for it. If you can't handle honest critical thought, that's on you.

I actually wrote a python program just to make this graph. I found myself arguing with spoiler effect deniers way too often. It is incredibly easy to show this effect happening now. And I can run it as many times as I like with random colors, candidate names, etc.

It is super neat.

This has been my exact suspicion as well. A staggering number of their responses fall end with 'Well I am voting third party whether you like it or not. Accept that.', or some variation of that kind of a phrase.