From Streetcars To Spaceships

Streetcars - a simple thought experiment

What is a streetcar?

It is a box, about eight feet wide, more or less weatherproof, able to be kept at a reasonable temperature, with plenty of transparent areas, ventilation, seating for about fifty to one hundred people, wheels that work on rails, brakes, motive means, internal lights, a suspension system, doors, usually though not always a fare collection system, somewhere for an operator to sit or stand.

What else?

So, if you had to build two or three of these, had a few years to get parts as surplus (say, starting with a standard surplus shipping container), how many hours of planning and execution would it take to build each one and how much would they cost?

Let's run a very rough estimation. All amounts are given in U.S. dollars and light to medium duty materials are assumed. We'll assume that this will be a typical small town streetcar, puttering back and forth along a fifty block or shorter route less than twelve hours a day and choosing ease of repair over durability. For what it's worth, a lot of these parts (like the doors and benches) could be scavenged off a school bus and old school buses cost about $2,000.

Box : $4,000
Doors (automatic, operator controlled) : $2,000 x 4 = $8,000
Acrylic windows (partially openable, made of sheet acrylic in aluminum picture frames on delrin pins to be able to open.) : 20 x $50 = $1,000
Acrylic skylights (2) : $600
Windshield wiper system, front and back : $500
Lights, including internal, headlamp, and indicator, all LED : $3,000
Sandblasting, paint, decoration, and waterproofing, includes some donated materials - $4,000
Climate control : $2,000
Insulation and soundproofing (obtained surplus) : $1,000
Seating - 20 padded benches, bought surplus from a church or other venue and/or scavenged from the schoolbus, repainted and reupholstered, at least two extra kept at the barn to be swapped in when needed.
20 x $130 : $2,600
Trucks, i.e. the unit of four wheels and a motor with gearing, all on a turnable frame including suspension and mounted underneath on heavy duty bearing ring.
2 trucks, each involving:
- frame (welded steel) : $500
- wheels 4 x $300 : $1,200 (note these are light duty wheels as vehicle weight and speed will be low)
- suspension : $4,000
- assorted truck mechanism components, including sensors for state of railbed and track : $1,000
- bearing ring : $500
- brakes : $3,000

So each truck is about $10,000, there are two, so trucks add about $20,000.
Motive means - 2 electrical motors, one in each truck : $5,000
Fare collection system - operator controlled : $2,000
Operator station : $2,000

Then let's add $10,000 for barn costs during assembly, $4,000 for engineering and design advice, $2,000 for fireproofing of some sort, and another $10,000 for something or other I forgot.

Now this gives us a sweet little trolley, light duty, assembled with some surplus parts and quite a bit of donated or low-cost labor. It can be run on weekends up and down Main Street, and perhaps have an extension off to the town school. It is by no means going to serve as a full replacement for anybody's private car but it can greatly reduce traffic jams at busy times and serve as an excellent and potentially revenue positive means to provide rudimentary public transit and build community support for establishing an upgradable right of way and eventual contruction of a more heavy duty but still non-polluting and locally run transit system.

All of this, assuming such usage, takes us to $80,000 per vehicle, give or take. Personally, If I were running such a project I would add as much as $6,000, eventually, to add aerodynamic cowlings. Even at those speeds and with that much stop and go, such things do matter. And I also think that the right combination of car enthusiasts, scroungers, engineering students, and a set designer or two could do better on most or all of the prices.

Whem in doubt, these prices include spares for some parts. If such a part fails or otherwise becomes unacceptable while in service (if, say, a seat gets slashed or a window knocked out), the maintenance person (people?) get a call then and there, drive over and meet the trolley, the part gets popped out (having been installed with slots and quick-releases) and a spare popped in, while the damaged unit is brought back to the barn to be repaired at leisure. You can do that when your whole operating range is less than two miles in diameter, at most and you rarely have passengers who need to get there right this minute.

So assuming that my numbers are valid, this gives us the three cars needed to get a small town trolley system running for about $250,000. Far less than the cost of a typical modern streetcar.

So now let's move on to track.

Trolley and rail tracks out there in the world are built as better materials variants on mid-eighteen hundreds' designs. A railbed or rail from the Victorian era is pretty similar to ones in use today. Let's start fresh. How about a right of way of cast cement with "rails" of L-bracket steel laid flat on top of the cement on synthetic rubber. If we can find L brackets with a slightly greater than ninety degree angle to maximize wheel contact or, in fact, run them through a pressure jig to make them so, all the better. As to how to attach them to the underlying rubber, I've long since been convinced that modern civil engineering gives very different and very specific answers re fasteners, adhesive, or whatever for varying degrees of temperature stresses, vibration, and load, so I'm leaving that for them to figure out.

The whole cement bed is poured over a gravel base, just to keep it simple. Or perhaps laid into the existing roadbed. Again, local conditions vary an awful lot. Maybe the lengths of cement are cast in a barn, then delivered and laid in by truck. Or, as the transcontinental railroad did it with many components, brought pre-built on the very tracks themselves as each segment goes in. We can even get fancy and have the cement pigmented to make the rail right of way more visible. What would all this cost per mile of roadway? Concrete is cheap. Angle steel is cheap. Casting and assembly would be cheap. Repair would be cheap. And, again, potentially all bought and assembled locally.

We can get to things like switches another day. (Especially since a system like this might not need any.) Not to mention the actual "troller" (i.e. pantograph), the thing that gets the electricity from the power lines to the trolley and the system that would carry the electricity, including towers, tension lines, substation, etc. I agree that all of those are essential (more or less) but I haven't seen anything any less subject to the same sort of reevaluation about those than about the aspects discussed above. The only points I think are worth making is that such a light duty system could well take advantage of three options, to some degree or other:

One, mount some or all of the power lines on buildings along the route

Two, have a small capacity battery pack within the vehicle so as to allow breaks in the available current

Three, use "plastic lumber" for some of the parts typically built of steel and/or pressure treated wood, thereby obviating the maintenance needs of both, the short replacement cycle of the latter, and the high capital cost of the former. And, being non-conductive, it could require less in the way of insulators, thereby further reducing complexity, weight, and cost.

Where does this leave us?

For about a million bucks and use of two middlin' large buildings, a town could have a pretty effective trolley system. One that can be upgraded and extended as time goes by, just as they did it in the old days. One that would be cheap to run, cheap, simple, and fast to set up, wouldn't require, though it would certainly gain from, a dedicated right of way. One that would provide local jobs (especially with all that work being done right there in the area), cut down on traffic and pollution, reduce drunk driving, build community, and generally do happy things for everybody but the local car dealer and gas station.

And the whole damn thing would cost less than many a high school football stadium.

But these are just my back of the envelope calculations. It would make me very happy indeed to see some of you out there in the world take this on.

What are your estimates? Am I massively off in my pricing? Did I forget some crucial system?

And regulations aren't discussed here at all. Clearly I have not addressed, most obviously, ADA compliance. There is typically resistance to using means such as paratransit to provide transit means for the disabled when the mainstream vehicles can be adapted. Note that in this case we're talking a system barely a mile or two long where a valid case can be made that given the vast difference in price between a conventional rail system or even bus system and this kind of trolley system and the budget and operational limits of a small town, this is not asking a choice between a compliant system and a non-compliant system but between a non-compliant system, perhaps with some supplementary paratransit service, and no system at all.

But, again, I'm done talking and now I want to see what you think.

Please, tell me.

-Rustin

What is our economy doing anyway?

I just spent the evening at the Guapo pre-party for the Stumptown Comics Fest. Bunches of talented artists. Plenty of good writers. Clear indications that production costs continue to be microscopic for savvy people doing short runs. Some evidence of demand. Plenty of creators talking about passionate customers.

And nobody seems to be making any money worth a damn.

And I've been looking at economic factors from housing prices and starts to the whole complex reality behind the "biofuels are causing the rise in grain prices" disinformation. I've looked at several dozen variables until my eyes are popping out. And I'm a son of two academics, not to mention being a former economics major.

Hi. My name is Rustin H. Wright and I have no freakin' clue as to where we are going in the next few years.

The Eee PC and its like are glorious. Open source is thriving and expanding to things like mechancial design and small scale tooling. Open source and other low-cost tools for educators, from primary school to graduate school, are turning up like Topsy. Planting techniques are thriving, from new dwarf fruit-bearing trees to vegetated rooftop technologies. New bandages can dramatically cut blood loss from major wounds and car sales are trending back to smaller vehicles.

So it's the start of a golden age, right?

Meanwhile, much of Asia is in a crazed rush to recreate all of the foolish consumerism of fifties through nineties America, from highways to heart disease. Infectious diseases are doing things that keep me from sleeping at night. Which makes sense since a drug-resistant variety of C. Dif almost killed me a few years back. (That's a month of hospital time I would rather not have to remember.) Totalitarian tools and laws are spreading and settling all over the place, from English surveillance programs to U.S. web intrusions while millions of Americans still don't seem to understand that 24 is government-backed propaganda brilliantly designed and implemented to validate authoritarian practices.

So we're doomed, right?

I have been trying to make sense of this for years now and all that I'm sure of overall is that the rate of change is accelerating.

At least it won't be dull.

-Rustin

And now for something for something completely . . . beautiful.

Click here.

You can find information on the folks who made it here. And another flying wonder here.

We well and truly live in the future.

And while these are clearly meant for safe, windless environments, the principles certainly apply to vehicles out there in the big bad real world. The systems in these devices, like ion engines, are very low impulse. But we've all seen how fast a jellyfish can move in hundreds of atmospheres of pressure so clearly the possibilities are considerable. I've been waiting for dynamic equilibrium, manta-derived airships since the late eighties. It's wonderful to see them finally entering the real world.

Back in my days at Engineering News-Record I told the publisher that when my own publishing business launched I was going to came back to ENR's open plan offices (which we were just then moving into) and fly a miniature airship emblazoned with my company logo across the creative department. I really need to see about doing that.

-Rustin

A Smoking Gun In The Hands of the Transit Monopolists

I found a stack of old newspapers at an estate sale last weekend. One from right about the end of World War II caught my eye. I think that what I found is pretty damn important since it documents a transit monopoly that isn't in the much-discussed Snell Report. He certainly did a great job but in the several years I've been researching the history of transit, I've found some pretty massive relevant cases that he doesn't, iirc, talk about except to say in general terms that such activities were going on. I'm hoping that by posting this sort of thing I can shed a bit more light on what really created our current appalling situation. Hopefully some of y'all will link or this or, even better, copy it and spread it around.

No effective discussion of the viability of public transit in America is possible if we still believe that "the market" caused what was, over and over, the result of corporate sabotage and even government collusion.

As you read this, remember, this means that the companies named below, if these charges are valid, which I very much suspect they are, were undermining transport up and down the west coast right before and during World War II. As far as I'm concerned, that is treason and every key decisionmaker should have been taken out and hanged at dawn.

Literally.

-Rustin

Oregon Journal
Final Edition
Wednesday, October 24th, 1945

Travel Conspiracy Charged

WEST COAST BUS ROUTES IN QUESTION

Monopoly Rap Hits S.P., Greyhound, Standard Oil Co.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 24 - The government today charged eight companies, including the Southern Pacific Railroad company, the Pacific Greyhound Lines and the Standard Oil company of California, with conspiracies in restraint of trade and with attempts to monopolize trade routes in West Coast states.
In a suit filed in federal court here under the Sherman antitrust act, the companies were accused of conspiracy and of monopolizing trade and commerce in transporting bus and rail passengers along routes between Portland and San Francisco and along the Coast highway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The other companies named are the Greyhound Corporation of Chicago; Dollar Lines of Portland; Interstate Transit Line and Interstate Transit Lines, Inc., and the Union Pacific Stages, Inc., all of Omaha, Neb.

"CLOSED DOOR" ALLEGED
The complaint alleged the defendants have been in a combination to eliminate and keep out competitors along the above named routes, and to control west-bound passenger traffic by "closed door' agreements.
The suit was filed here by James McI. Henderson, chief of the West Coast offices of the anti-trust division, acting under order from U.S. Attorney General Tom C. Clark in Washington, D.C.
"The abuses we are aiming to correct are beyond the scope of the interstate commerce commission," Henderson said. "We want to implement its efforts to create a competitive system between San Francisco and Portland, and between San Francisco and Los Angeles on the Coast route."

SUBSIDIARY UTILIZED
The government charged that since 1936 Pacific Greyhound Lines and Dollar Lines have operated the only common carriers for transportation of passengers by bus between Portland and San Francisco and along the Coast highway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The Dollar Lines was named as being controlled by the Pacific Greyhound Lines and used as a second-class service "to forestall competition from any new motor carrier."
It is further charged Southern Pacific is active in the management of the Pacific Greyhound Lines and that, with the Greyhound Corporation, it controls all voting stock in the Pacific firm. The suit seeks to divest Southern Pacific and Greyhound of interest in the Dollar Lines.
Also sought is cancellation of all contracts and agreements between Pacific Greyhound, Dollar Lines, Greyhound corporation, Standard Oil and the Southern Pacific which in any way would restrict competition among such concerns and their affiliates.
The suit alleged Standard oil, in consideration of purchase by Pacific Greyhound of some $750,000 annually in gas and oil, allows the bus firm a free hand in operating the Dollar Lines.

END

I walk. That shouldn't be a problem.

I live in Portland, Oregon; said to be a paragon of environmentally responsible policy.

But in this city, if you don't drive, you're still a second class citizen in many ways. And "class" is very much a crucial word as many of these phenomena grow out of an active antipathy to those of us on foot.

Now, I could go on for pages about theory and semantics and the "messages" within what I see but instead I'm going to jump to what needs to change.

Hey, Sam Adams! Hey, Ted Wheeler! Hey! All of you in Portland government who say that you want more folks to leave their cars at home! I've got a news flash for you: not only are not all of us car-free folks on bikes, in some cases bikes aren't even the best solution.

So if you really want to help Portland cut the automotive addiction, here are a few concrete steps to take:

- Enforce regulations requiring that rights of way be kept clear. If somebody's sidewalk is blocked by a ten foot tall hedge, fine their ass and use half the money to pay for more inspectors.

- Require businesses that accomodate people in cars to accomodate people on bikes or on foot. If the drivethrough lane at McDonalds is all night, then why isn't there a window where a person on foot can walk up and order? Again, hefty fines should get folks moving on this and I totally understand including a one year period after the law changes for education of businesses before enforcement cuts in.

- Allow cabs to pick up fares from the street. As any Londoner or New Yorker or Parisian can tell you, a key part of living car-free is knowing that when you do choose to use a vehicle, the choices are practical and fast. Why is it that when I leave a club at 2:00 a.m., only then can I call a cab company and then have to wait around for one to show? Parts of Portland are dense enough to have plenty of cabs driving by at most hours. I see no sufficient reason that I should have to make a call, wait on hold, and then stand around for ten to thirty minutes to get one to pick me up. Especially in the rain.

- More crosswalks. This isn't rocket science. Cars, "of course", use every intersection but pedestrians are supposed to walk as much as five blocks out of our way to find the rare intersection the city condescends to make available for our use. Gawd forbid we impede the flow of the pollution boxes by having the same rights they do. Bullshit. If there's an intersection, I should be allowed to cross there unless it's an onramp for a bridge or some such.

- Get rid "push to cross" buttons. Crossing a street isn't some special privilege for cars, why should we have to, in effect, ask permission before being "allowed" to bloody well cross the street?

- Move transit stops closer to destinations. As with cabs, most pedestrians also use busses and having the bus or the MAX stop allllll the way at the far edge of a mall or, say, the Portland Expo Center just adds one more impediment to leaving the car at home. Why should access for transit only be put out past the furthest possible space beyond the worst possible parking spots? I've seen plenty of other cities where busses pull right up to the front of college buildings, malls, and other places where reaching the buildings requires giving public transit a right of way through the parking lot. Why can't we do it here?

- Run busses later. It's a lot more realistic to walk if you know that if you get tired you have the option of taking public transit back. With all the bus lines shutting down by midnight, you can't even catch most late showings at the Bagdad or Hollywood or the Mission and still have any practical way home. Half an hour past "Beer-thirty" (i.e. 2:30, when alcohol must no longer be served) would be wonderful but just giving us buses until at least 1:00 a.m. on all major routes would make a huge difference.

I don't have financials on any of these. At some point I'll be putting them together. But given how much our current way of doing things is costing us, from road repairs to traffic jams to health problems, seems to me like these sorts of things should be medium term and maybe even short-term cash positive.

For now I'll just say that they're the right thing to do.

-Rustin

Speaking of life on Mars. . .

According to the May cover story in Geology, it's looking like there may have been more water on Mars more recently than is generally concluded. A lot more.

To quote:
After examining . . . images taken last year by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the researchers have documented for the first time that ice packs at least 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) thick and perhaps 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) thick existed along Mars' mid-latitude belt as recently as 100 million years ago. In addition, the team believes other images tell them that glaciers flowed in localized areas in the last 10 to 100 million years[.]

And if there was that much more that much more recently, that ups the odds that there is still more there now.

Take a look.

I'm sure as the dickens interested.

-Rustin

Jet Packs - some history to think about.

Back in the late nineties for a bit over a year I was the last line of defense for IT problems at a cluster of architecture/civil engineering magazines in McGraw-Hill. I wasn't even on staff. I was a freelancer and paid through a temp agency.
So I was in an interesting position. I had flexible hours (sorta) and no career commitment. And, due to a power vacuum, no one boss. But I has an office, a McG-H email and voicemail, could send out packages through the mailroom, and was, de facto and in some ways de jure, the "technology director" of a magazine called Engineering News-Record, which many engineers in other fields had heard of and had vague feelings of respect towards, even if they couldn't quite remember what field it actually covered.

So, why should you care?

Well, you see, this didn't happen quite as randomly as I make it sound. Actually I had worked hard and long to make this kind of thing happen. I knew that such gigs would give me something I wanted very much. Not only did this give me access to world-class experts who now wanted me to like them and the magazine reference libraries, I could also call up an astounding range of people and companies, tell them my title (and, of course, since almost nobody worth reaching answers the first call, have them call back and get my voicemail) and tell them that I was curious about a project of theirs and they would tell me all about it. Free samples, documentation, access to engineers, the works.

Even when I would explain that this was just a "personal interest" they wanted badly to believe that nudge-nudge, wink-wink, this was a prelude to a story. Also, being the geek that I am, I would never call up the cool people until I had some degree of clue. So it all seemed serious because, after all, I wasn't asking, "what is project foobar?". I was asking "given that I've heard that project foobar has problems with loss of blah under conditions of zorch and some work I did a few years ago with blahtoo mostly did that at high temperatures, are you focusing mostly on low intensity applications?" Show me the techie on a wired, underappreciated, and edgy project who doesn't want to bend a sympathetic and knowledgable ear and I'll show you a techie who has burnt out.

So . . . finally getting to the point, one thing that I looked into was jetpacks. You see, I'ld found it odd that people said that jet packs wouldn't work because jets didn't function well enough at those sizes, since back in my pre-teen model airplane days (I was an unpowered microplane builder, but I kept my eyes open), people were already building or buying jet engines for their *toys*.

So I called around. I called around a lot. And I finally reached a guy at JPL who told me an odd tale. Now I'll share it with you.

According to him, as far back as the forties, aerospace types were curious about the viability of doing jet packs and would have bull sessions about it when the chance came up. Since there wasn't any real military money in it, or commercial for that matter, it all sat on the back burner. But little by little stuff started to come together and, as we have all seen in the famous clip in The Six Million Dollar Man the military started to get interested too.

So, one guy at a time, a team was assembled at JPL. Basically the word got out around the country that if jetpacks were your bag, you should make your way to Pasadena. And they started to work on the problem in a low-key but structured, let's-get-serious way.

So, what are the specs of a good jetpack?
-It doesn't need to go fast. By aircraft standards, it will virtually stand still as anything faster will tear the wearer to bits.
-It must run cool. Really cool. Hot engine equals leg kebob.
-It must be quiet. Human limitations again.
-It must have plenty of range. No point in the thing if it just goes up and back down again.
-Small payload. You've got a person and his gear. No big bombs or weighty frames to support.

So they picked their slide rules and got to work. But there was just one little thing. A tiny thing. Go back and read that list. Looks a lot like the specs for stealth aircraft, doesn't it?
Allegedly one day during the Nixon administration a couple of folks from the White House just showed up at the project and said, "as of now you're all reassigned. Your work is all classified; you're now funded."
"Welcome to the cruise missile program".
And so the jetpack project morphed into cruise missile engine work and the original project got uncreated. And, predictably, as the years passed, when the none too large community of aerospace engineers would think of doing a jetpack the first thing that they would think of is "didn't Harry/Phil/Irving go off to JPL to work on that back in 19blah and nothing came of that at all? It must not be viable."

So here we are, all these years later, and yet we wait. Now I've looked around some. I know about the various rocket packs out there (and the novelty act crews making their living with them). I know about the ex-corporate guy and his big muckin' turbofans. I know about the New Zealand pulse jet crew. I've kept an eye open. But I suspect that there's some very cool stuff coming one of these days and it'll be a lot more polished then most people expect.

Sweet dreams.

- Rustin

Welcome to my blog.

What you see below this, what I posted first, is the kind of thing that you can expect to see here. I've been accumulating essays and protoessays on a variety of subjects, mostly technological, political, or both, for quite a few years now. This place is here to provide one central archive for all of them, one that lets us discuss them and, hopefully, make them better.

And then make them happen.

I won't be putting up too many posts about my daily life. I may disappear sometimes for three or four months at a time. Got a lot on my plate, you see. I will probably post about movies and music and all the rest now and again but, hey, I could do that anywhere. It is my intent that this place stay considerably more meaty.

A few more things for you to know:

- I like long comments. As long as you have something to add to the conversation, I'm delighted if folks want to write five page commentaries. Brevity is wonderful but not at the sake of completing a thought.

- I will delete comments I don't like. This is my online living room and people I don't like will be cut off and, if necessary, banned.

- I have no tolerance for rudeness or sloppy thinking. Posts here will be expected to be thought out in every way. Considered, fact-based (you all know where to find Google), properly spelled (by and large), and on topic. I will cut people some slack if they're basically clearheaded and coherent. Or funny. But contentless stream of conciousness will be deleted. I don't care how you feel unless posting about those feelings brings the topic further along.

A few years ago I wrote "Rustin's Rules of Order" on Slashdot. Some time soon I'll post a revised version here.

That's all for now.

I hope you like it.

-Rustin

Living In The Kuiper Belt

Did you know that by current estimates there are about ten billion objects over one mile across in the Kuiper Belt?
My, that's an awful lot of real estate.
So, what exactly does that mean? To me it means lots of elbow room.
In the past few years I've increasingly suspected that, barring the invention of a practical warp drive, the real advance of humanity will be:
* Earth
* * Earth and near-Earth orbit
* * * Earth-Moon system with small, Antarctica-type settlements on/around Mars and Venus
* * * * Earth, Mars, and Venus systems with Asteroid belt as the Outback
* * * * * () () Discrete civilizations in regions of Near-sun, Venus-to-Mars, each of the gas giants, off the orbital plane, and Kuiper Belt.

So, how much room is out there anyway?
Hmmm. Lessee. Assume that the objects are spherical (therefore a gross underestimation) with a diameter of one mile. r of 0.5, rsquared of 0.25, times 4, times pi, gives us a surface area of about 3.1. Given the roughness of the surface and that we're dealing with greater than one mile, then even if we skim off one hundred feet from the top, we've got an average area of about four miles.

So the total surface area is about forty billion square miles. Conservatively estimated.

Well, the Earth's surface area is about two hundred million square miles, meaning that the Kuiper Belt objects have a combined surface area of about two hundred times that of the earth.

Put another way, if there were a hundred thousand projects like this one going on, they'ld be using one seven thousandth of one percent of the rock out there. This all assuming, by the way, that all rocks are equal and basically hunks of iron ore and ice.

Who will do it?
The more I find out, the more I suspect that first the Asteroid Belt and then the Kuiper Belt will each be settled much the way the religious utopians settled the American West. In other words, forget this NASA To The Stars mahooah. Forget even the Big Corporation Takes Over Everything model. Governments can't get their act together and corporations will not see a profit justification. The real settlers will be those strongly motivated to get away from the rest of society and organized enough, well capitalized enough, and with enough oomph (that's a technical term) from some charismatic leader to keep them from getting distracted or settling for easier targets.

Three kinds of folk will *really* settle non-planetary space. Small groups of genius-loners, outlaws, and whatever the equivalent will be of the mid-1800's Mormons, in other words, tightly integrated communities with resources, a vision, and a serious antipathy to the company of most people. Because only they will have the will, the means, and be up for handling the hardship. The first to give up the comforts of "civilization" are those who are least comfortable in it.

One strange statement that turns up all over to "refute" approaches like this is that people would never survive the isolation. As for interaction, well, again, look at the American West. Or look at the small groups of Polynesians who would settle a new island hundreds of miles from their home and be isolated there, sometimes for decades. Add to that the admittedly time-delayed high bandwidth interaction that may be possible (I see no limits on technology, only on possible desire to stay low profile). In other words, "video" messages with 3D images at a resolution of perhaps 50K pixels by 200K pixels, sound beyond our ability to distinguish from reality with perhaps the equivalent of ten channels, and probably some limited spacial and or other sensory cues. The round trip message transit time would be under a day. No worse then many people's email routines now. Vastly superior to the mail delays with which people did just fine for millennia. And hopefully, just like on any frontier, every once in a while a ship should come by with terabyte upon terabyte of books, movies, music, etc.

Given that for centuries sailors and occasionally soldiers routinely lived alone with each other for months and with only minimal contact with others like them for years at a time and I don't see the problem here. And frankly, given recent advances in things like biofeedback (don't you scoff at me, boy! the navy gets it, as do doctors and many others) and psychology in general and this whole "oh dear, they'ld just wilt away of loneliness and die" thing sounds to me like the people who used to say that the human mind would tear itself apart if we ever traveled faster than fifteen or twenty miles an hour.

But. . .
Of course, the big x-factor in all of this is power generation. Because for now, bottom line, all of our energy but nuclear is solar powered. If current fission reactors as we know them continue to be a condition of living without sun, then it may well be more practical to travel to another solar system. I'm betting that a way will be found.

What will they do?
So, if we pull that off, then tunnel out the inside of a rock and give it light and heat it up. Once it's hot it should stay that way if fifty or a hundred feet of rock is left as insulation. And we certainly know of plenty of ways to insulate otherwise. I suspect that making foamed rock in space won't be too big a deal. Even foamed rock with a shiny, reflective surface. Making O'Neill type colonies within asteroids should be the natural way to go.

Here's the plan. Choose a rock, send out plenty of robots to drill out the center or at least chambers in the center. Maybe even allow them fifty or a hundred years to finish the job. Give the robots the plans to melt in "piping" and chambers for atmosphere compression and expansion, greenhouses and a few other densely vegetated areas, utility rooms separate from the rest, landing areas, surface structures built from the processed "waste" rock, and at least one really big room in the center. Let's say a central chamber three miles by two by two.

One key reason to have multiple greenhouse and vegetated chambers is to isolate each from the rest. As the fiasco at Biosphere Two demonstrated, closed systems can go really bad really fast. Best to have multiple small-ish chambers separated by vacuum and with divergent temperatures, humidity, etc. And with modern approaches to permaculture, we can grow a wondrous amount of food in a very small space at a very low cost in resources and labor. Let go of any images in your head of rows of uniform crops spaced a meter apart in otherwise bare soil. I'm proposing something that would look and act far more like a block of rainforest, complete with several species of ants, bees, and all the rest. Integrated in to this would be what is known as a "living machine", which would look like a wetland but act as a waste processor. Add to this a few dozen tanks in which to grow in vitro "meat" and life on the far frontier might not be so bad in some ways.

Other robots are collecting the water and any organics they can, starting an atmosphere, seeding it with basic microorganisms and a few very hardy plants and animals which will happily terraform their surroundings, creating soil and the like. Ideally the animals and plants are designed to only survive in, say, less than one half atmosphere of pressure, insuring a big safe buffer zone between their turf and ours.
If you really want to get cute, a third species of robots is collecting salable raw materials like gold or even making finished goods and periodically sending shipments back to help fund the whole venture. Again, remember, it may be just fine to have a shipment take ten years to arrive so low-power things like ion engines running on thrifty trajectories are not a problem.

Let's say our group starts this plan in year X, and sends the first robots in X+2. The robots take their time but even so, there should be basic bunks and habitation ready by X+10, a period that is routinely accepted by real estate projects. (Most of the delay is due to transit time.) By X+20 there are perhaps five hundred people living there and creating all the essentials of a living community from bookstores to bars to local jokes and slang.

Now if we allow this project to incorporate a cluster of such conversions (taking as our community model groups like the Ecovillage people, who build first one unit and then allow a local sort of ongoing mitosis) then by X+30 there might be a cluster of habitats, with, say, five hollow worldlets and two dense-packed, aircraft carrier-type structures, and a total of a hundred thousand people.

Putting it in perspective
It seems to me that this whole thing is viable technologically, sociologically, economically, esthetically, and even in terms of being salable and manageable. Keep in mind that no aspect of this but the distances involved is a large as those of a spec housing development is now. If fuel use can be brought way down (taking us back to solar sails or ion engines with photovoltaics and using extremely slow flight paths) and the materials are mostly already out of the gravity well, then we're talking less in materials of almost every sort then must be gathered now to create a large casino complex or remote military base.
Our government built entire cities in the mountains of Laos during the Indochina wars with fifties and sixties technologies and they did it in contested territory, building everything from supermarkets to movie theaters to houses.

If you just stop and look at the whole thing from the perspective of how we have lived in this past, post-frontier century and instead go by the standards of things that people have done on a repeating basis for thousands of years along frontiers, then none of this looks like a big deal to me.

Or rather, it is a big deal, but only in the way that making a Steven Seagal movie is a big deal. Complicated, expensive, but not radical or edgy. We aren't talking about quantum advances in technology or anything else. Just difficult and expensive variations on things that will by then have been done thousands of times. And, as I have pointed out, much of this can be started now.

If you still don't believe me, then sit down three graduate students from any decent robotics program (personally I would choose my old fellows at Carnegie-Mellon, but I'm not particular) and show this set of tasks to each of them. I think that it's safe to say that at least two of them would agree that there aren't any fundamental leaps here. Just more effective versions of systems that we're building now.

And the finishing touch is that if one truly did want to send people to another solar system, then a cluster just like the one I described would be an awfully sane way to go. After all, if one chooses a cluster that is already a few decades old, then the "shake-down voyage" will be very long past and it will all have taken place within a few light-hours of Earth.

And. And. . . Go back, look again at what I've proposed. Expand the time scale, remove having humans travel out there during early construction as well as the bioengineered part. If you're willing to be very careful about energy usage, you've now got a project that could be started today. Just like my previous post about settling Mars. We could realistically have the first robots in transit by 2009. Just keep sending batches as funding comes through and technology advances. At the very least it would be a hell of a way to stake a claim to some prime Kuiper real estate.

And the kicker? Add another type a robot. A propulsion bot, that just reshapes stuff into primitive engines and/or can itself be an engine. These are probably about eight years away at current rates of advancing tech. Add some of those to the mix when they become available. Then you can have them bring the whole kit and caboodle back to earth orbit. Sure, at current tech building the propulsion and travel time would add up to about two hundred years, but the sooner we start, the sooner we're ready to leave.
And if the naysayers are right, and our economy really is heading to a collapse and we've got another little ice age on the way and the totalitarians are on the way to creating an innovation-dead worldwide police state, our descendants will know that as soon as they get their act together a whole trove of wonders will be up there waiting for them.

Conclusion:
So that's what I think. Interstellar travel is a cool idea. Great for storytelling and not only fun as the dickens but deeply satisfying for all those testosterone-soaked desires to go out and conquer all that there is to see. But realistically, our position in this solar system is about the same as the position of the early humans roaming a few sections of African veldt and calling it the World. We'll be spending a long time around here and have more chances then we'll want to diverge into indescribably diverged civilizations and races long before we first awaken to the sunrise of another star.

-Rustin

We should be sending robots to Mars. In 2008.

So now we're finally seeing people talk about getting humans to Mars.

I think that's just jim-dandy.

What I can't understand is why we aren't prepping a robot mission right now. Today. We know plenty of ways already to get something in the way of supplies there and we know how to send robots that would, at the least, dig a shelter, start collecting water, and purify a few thousand liters of oxygen and other useful raw materials. Or to be still more modest, we could send a few tiny surveying robots. Tiny, slow moving, solar powered beasties sending their data to a booster for retransmission to Earth but designed to work for months at the least, puttering along collecting information.

Seems to me like we should just bloody well choose a promising landing spot, choose something we can build with today's technology, and get some kind of payload on the way in, say, the next six months. And then keep sending them. Every. Six. Months. Or more frequently as we figure out what we're doing and/or round up more funding. Worst case scenario, the human mission will land at another site, in which case they'll still have supplies a hell of a lot closer than earth.

And let's keep in mind that small missions like this would actually work better if they were private. Which seems far smarter to me anyway. Then perhaps they can they bill NASA for supplies when the NASA mission finally shows up.

But the longer we wait to start, the longer it will take to get this going. Doesn't it make more sense to start with one robot crew to work as explained above, another to do more of the same and build a clear, airtight enclosure and make growing medium, and then the third to turn the first enclosure into a high-density greenhouse, (or two or three separated ones with different flora) all started from seed? If it also devotes some effort to purifying fuel, well, that would be great, too.

Plenty of people are working on the technologies and enough are ready now. No, they're not "just right", but right now is much better than just right afaic. We need to get our butts in gear and get some useful materials on the way NOW.

Yes, I am well aware of the limitations of current robots. I was trying to build little automated rotation points back when Reagan was president. But we still have plenty of devices that can run for years if done right. Think of it as a codesign between the Long Now folks and Rodney Brooks' lab. Maybe this means two really tough robots; maybe it means a hundred ones the size of your thumb, of which half will "die" within six months. But one way or another, it means that while we sit around here on earth planning the human mission, work is already underway to make Mars a more habitable place.

Let's ask ask some questions.
1- how small a payload could be of use? Two kilos? Five? A solar panel hooked up to a simple but slow crude ore digger and refiner? And when it's done you've got the metal to reuse. Keep in mind, no communications with earth beyond a once a month ping.
2 - how large a rocket would it take to get that on the way on the most "thrifty" trajectory?
3 - How much would that cost to buy at surplus? say, an old ICBM? And to refit?
4 - What fraction of a decimal place is this amount compared to the cost of sending THE SAME MASS IN A HUMAN OPTIMIZED VEHICLE?

Sorry about "yelling", but my point is that even if the frickin' thing doesn't work worth a damn, it's still cheaper, kilo for kilo, than waiting and shipping the same mass along with the human mission. Not to mention the things we learn simply from increasing the number of iterations we accumulate of getting stuff to Mars at all. There is no down side.

Seems to me like a perfect project for an ambitious and underrespected college engineering program partnered with a corporation looking to burnish their public image. Admittedly, any mission launched in 2008 would have to be almost literally off-the shelf. Probably a very low tech surveyor that will have to wait for the next mission to get its booster. Or even just a "dumb" box of supplies such as ruggedized solar panels. But I'll betcha that if we launch something in December 2008, something much better will be ready by June of 2009.

So, anybody know a good candidate?

'Cause you know that I'm going to talk to folks at my local engineering school and, hell, I know they're looking for ways to get publicity anyway.

-Rustin