You wake up one day on permanent vacation. There are only so many jobs in the economy now that robotics take care of most routine tasks, from elder-care to organic farming. There are only many service industry jobs, too. You spend much of your time online, playing games, but you decide today to play tourist and see the real world with your own, mark one, eyeballs.
You live comfortably enough, a free one-room apartment with free food and utilities, including bandwidth. It's rationed, of course. If you want more than your stipend, you'll have to find a job to pay for it... but there is no real push or pull to do so. Most people dream by what used to be called TV, before it became interactive and immersive. The food isn't bad, but it's uninspired. Most families, or groups of neighbors, have an amateur cook or chef who dabbles in turning the raw ingredients into something tastier, but today you don't bother.
You plan on traveling, so you treat yourself to an old-fashioned breakfast, sausage, scrambled eggs, toast and orange juice. The sausage meat is tissue cultured pork, as are the eggs, but the juice and the bread came ultimately from local indoor hydroponic farms, either greenhouses tended by robots under the supervision of a 'farmer', or underground tunnels lit indirectly by the sun, or wind, wave, even nuclear (All that radioactive waste left over from last century is getting 'burned' up in comparatively much safer nuclear cans (after all, it will be gone, then, and not left lying around in corroding steel canisters!) with few moving parts, and mostly do it someplace far away, just like the solar power is mostly collected in the middle of a desert).
After breakfast you throw the dishes in the dishwasher, which these days cleans them and puts them away. You could have left them lying around for the apartment robotics to see to, but tidy habits die hard and make you something of a nonconformist. The place leaves your stuff alone or puts it where you designate it belongs if you just leave it, but otherwise keeps the apartment clean and safe. The place is a little sad because you have to keep things to code. It'd be different if you owned it, or won the lottery and could move someplace, own real estate...
Out the door and down the hall you take the elevator. None of these free apartments is in a small building, so you drop down twenty stories to the street, which moves. Slidewalks always used to be the stuff of science fiction, but with smart materials somebody got the idea to work. Surfaces slide over each other now if you want them to, and you step onto the moving surface and walk out to the faster band in the center. The slidewalk can slide you as well; a few kids come gliding past, skating along. The active surface helps pedestrians keep their footing by variable acceleration, so you don't stand with one foot in a faster lane and have that foot drift out from under you, or cause you to turn slowly in circles, although you can, if you want to. Since you do, you say "spin" and the slide walk responds by spinning your patch and moving it around in traffic.
It's a good, sunny day, no smog to see or smell. No large powered vehicles in sight, either. Goods get delivered to your house of business underground in a system of tunnels. People move around by foot or slidewalk, and go long distances with a faster, underground or elevated version of the same. They call it 'The Tube' because it is a version of the slidewalk which wraps up and over, and speeds you rapidly along.
You're coming up on the tube now. You slide around the spot where the tube comes out of the ground, opens up and flattens out, what seems like a big curved wall under a sun-catcher canopy, weave around people getting off the thing and into the acceleration zone. A hump of the slidewalk has bunched up and now stretches and speeds up from the crawling pace designed for universal access to over fifty miles per hour down into a well lit tunnel. Behind you an old man says "bench" and the slidewalk obliges by moving wall and floor around to gather enough layers in one place to form a curved bench that slides along smoothly behind you. He adds a destination and settles down to take a nap. The bench will make all the connections for him while he dreams of the good old days.
Your plans are for a long-distance journey, and for that you need an even faster version of the tube, stacked up on this one. Where this is fifty times faster than crawling, the 'intercity tube' is ten times faster than that. You walk up a slight hill of bunched up slidewalk to get on it and the tube diameter is a bit smaller, but the principle is just the same. Away you go, and you take a page from the old man's book as you settle down for the hours-long ride cross continent.
TBC
I figured out how ASMNT (aluminosilicate molecular nanotechnology) works in the mine-seed application (This is an idea I had for exploiting methane clathrates, 'fire-ice', the biggest form of hydrocarbon we don't currently use. Methane is a strong greenhouse gas, so better to burn it into CO2 and water than to let it get into atmo...). The wallsof the mine-seed are grown from the inside-out and the outside-in, as needed, and then we cut, paste and slide. I estimate a complex, 10^9 atom individual element, 100 atoms wide, about 10 nanometers (10^-8 meter), and 10^5 atoms deep, or 10^-5 m. It would take 10^9*10^-6 seconds or 1,000 seconds per element, provided that all the feedstock and fuel is there. If the mine-seed is a 10 meter cylinder with one meter hemisphere end-caps, which is 10*1*pi + 1^2*pi, or 11*pi m^2, ~11*22/7 m^2 is 242/7 is 34 4/7 m^2. Say this is 4.2 g/cc or 4,200 kg/m^3 and walls 10^-5 thick, so the mass of the mine-seed is 242/7 * 4200 * 1/10^5 is 242*600/10^5 is (1200 + 240 + 12)/1000 is 1452/1000 is 1.452 kg, about 3 pounds. It's a little over 8 tonnes of water... if we give it ballast in the form of some silicate feedstock and pump some air or O2 under pressure, which I want some anyway, for powering the mine-seed.
The mine-seed 'lands' on the seabed, and moves around seeking a methane-clathrate deposit. When it is in the right place, it grows 'roots' into the fire-ice, to harvest the methane for transport and use. The root walls can grab O2 from sea water, CH4 from the ore-body, silicates from the seabed, create more membranes for doing those things and for creating more membrane (not a universal assembler, but a programmable loom or molecular mill, fuel cells, pumps and ducted fans, solenoids and servos, circuitry, all of the things we need to build submersible tankers and freighter for transport and further resource exploration. Or the thing just spreads out under the seabed, growing a pipeline to the land, wherever we need the stuff to go...
I think we need a hundred tonnes of this stuff to go into production; development at one man-hour per atom, a billion atoms times 100 different mills, 10^11 hours divided by 10 years at 2,000 hours per, 2*10^4, so we need 5 million people working for 10 years. If the average worker is costing the effort $100,000 per year for 10 years, or $10^6, which is $5*10^12. Argh! Wages plus stuff, another order of magnitude more... call it a factor of 5, $2.5*10^13. It gives us a mature ASMNT, or the first step to one, a toddler step, as opposed to a baby step.
***
Also thinking how an ASMNT slidewalk would take advantage of silicate materials' natural tendency to form sheets. The moving sheets are tens of millions of atoms thick (10^7*10^-10 m is 10^-3 m) and bunch up at embarkation and disembarkation zones. The edges of the high-speed section roll up, actually sliding apart and then back together again. The system has a slight bow and is permeable, draining water and sifting light dirt below the moving surface. It bunches up, going from a millimeter to five centimeters, and 25 meters per second to 1/2, or 1.8 kilometers per hour, about 1 mph, crawling speed, and up to 90 klicks, over 50 mph. Slow for I-95, but pretty good for a pedestrian. At these speeds, the slidewalk really needs to be enclosed. The 5 meter bowed bed becomes a 10 meter enclosed tunnel. Perhaps the slidewalk is a millimeter thick and goes to 30 cm, about foot thick, in the slow zone. It rolls over a surface, in turn, which accelerates or decelerates the sheets and swaps out damaged sections as needed. The 10 m tunnel could narrow and accelerate, to 2 m and ~280 mph!
An ASMNT loom could make a new section every 10^5 seconds, a little over a day. Incidentally, the loom or molecular mill could travel inside the 10 million atom thick slidewalk segment as cargo... if the segments carry double-sided molecular mills with feedstock and fuel in the sandwich, they could be offloaded, formed up into pairs and accrete new slidewalk segment anywhere they can be resupplied.
The segments or scales are 1 mm thick and could easily be cubes, but let's make them 2.5 mm by 4 mm, or 1/100 of a cc. They are fairly flexible and can form tubes one cm in diameter. Ten layers would be 3 cm, just over an inch or a fingers' thickness. For manipulation of goods and cargo, we could easily form this stuff into arms and hands. Little three-fingered hands (2 fingers and a thumb) would be 7 cm tubes, short or long arms a little thicker, limbs to be built up into little tube-figures. Six to eight inches thick and maybe one or two feet tall with bland, smiling faces like something out of a manga or anime, they can be summoned from out of the slidewalk by the user, just as the slidewalk building blocks can be formed into chairs, benches, beds or desks and tables as needed. The Tube, tube-men and building blocks have a density of about 4.2 g/cc, but with lots of voids and space between layers to allow for 'softness' or at least 'give', it averages less, call it 2.8. So a 30 cm 'tubie' is more or less a flattened 15 cm tube 30 cm tall. What with the rounded edges and flattening, it is a little over half of 30 by 15^2, say 30*15*8 cc or 3600 cc, or ~10 kg, about 22 pounds. A small dog or fat cat.
Imagine wearing this stuff as powered armor!
Woops, what about speed? The classic loom is operating at 50 megahertz, 5*10^7 times a second, across 10^-8 m, or 1/2 m/s^2, per layer. That's good enough for the slidewalk, which can afford to accelerate people at those speeds, or slower. If we want more, we need only stack up moving layers; ten, or 1 cm is 5 m/s^2, and 2 cm is 10 m/s^2, about one G. We'd need to make exoskeletal battle armor out of faster stuff, but a 'tire' 3 cm thick would have 15 m/s^2 of acceleration. Build a sweet little roadster, even an off-road monster with fat wheels of slidewalk-stuff with a as many wheels as you need, or as few. A unicycle you ride inside of, maybe with outriders, an egg with two fat tank-like treads or half an ellipsoid with dozens of gimballed 7 cm tires, where you lie prone as in a high-speed motorcycle, but a quarter meter off the ground.
With enough energy and materials, I imagine the system could reproduce itself every 10^5 seconds. A week is about 6*10^5 seconds and a year is about 50 times as long, 3*10^7 seconds. Nothing is as simple as that, but change will be faster than we can react as a society, leading to the usual economic, social and general misery in the near-term, opportunity and prosperity in the long-term. If full employment in the ASMNT Project occupied 5 million people for 10 years, then it is a major sector of the national economy. I'd expect it to branch out into energy, manufacturing, transportation, etc. until it is the economy; $2.5 Trillion a year is ~17% of the US economy at present, and the US consumes a quarter of the world's stuff. It wouldn't double every year, although it could. Just to keep things comprehensible, if the ASMNT sector grows at 20% (just a bit faster than China 8-), and employs 10% more people a year, then in 10 years it will be equal to the entire US Economy and employ about 13 million people. Eight years later it will be bigger than the current world economy and employ some 28 million people.
I set this up to start 15 years from now and in 2050 the ASMNT 'Sector' is 11 times as big as the current US GDP, and employs 45 million people. It basically is the economy now; even with strong growth in the regular economy, I expect ASMNT should be more than half of it. In over twenty years it will have replaced most regular manufacturing, resource extraction, transportation, and energy production. It won't replace agriculture, probably, but it will change how farming happens. Robotics would make 'free range' and organic foods cheap. Indoor hydroponic farming would make food production local again.
By 2060, ASMNT produces over a million billion dollars worth of stuff and employees 116 million people, fourteen times as big as I guesstimate the US economy to be in early half a century of slow growth, and occupying the time and energy of over one percent of the world population. Deflation is a given, as more goods chase only so many dollars, plus people won't really need for much. With that kind of wealth, even a corporate state would find it cheaper to buy off dissent with free stuff, especially in a dystopia where corporate-funded welfare provided drugged food, slanted media, etc. I doubt it would be so monolithic, and I hope we could manage 'much more plenty' better than we have managed a little prosperity so far!
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Sunday, January 29, 2012
43 Atoms of Stuff!
Grab 50 atoms from anywhere on (or in) the Earth and 30 of them are Oxygen; 10 of them are Silicon, and 3 are Aluminum. These three elements are the most abundant on Earth, and Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the Solar System. Planning for living out there is mostly about finding volatiles, organics and Nitrogen plus trace amounts of Phosphorus, Calcium and Potassium for life support, and because we'd like to live among living things, not just man-made systems... at least I'd like to, and I expect we'd be saner and healthier that way!
But back to those 43 of fifty atoms; they make up silly silicates (ceramics, glass and stone) and aluminosilicates (like the mineral feldspar), since Aluminum will cut in on Silicon, by turns rudely or politely, and make Geology, and the chemistry of the same, so much more interesting. In molecular nanotechnology Carbon is king, but it has problems. It oxidizes or burns; despite being strong and doing neat 3-D tricks, it doesn't do some things very well. It doesn't self-assemble like proteins will, or silicates. Silica forms strings and chains and sheets; leaves voids useful for sifting and for cabling with other polymers on the small and on the sly. It's what lab chemistry happens inside of, in the form of glass, or on. We historically have built with it, shaped and fired it, formed it into molten glass, and molested it chemically to make photovoltaic cells. It's everything, pretty much, that we need it to be, and it's everywhere, out there in space or on the Earth, that we want to be!
The last time I thought much about MNT design, I assumed that, like anything else, people would back different approaches with their time and money. Some of the futurists made it sound like the hardware and software of each approach would be like a software language and hardware platform, like the Old Wintel duopoly vs. Mac and Linux; now Google Android/Linux versus Apple, so-
Feldspar.adp (Aluminosilicate Design Protocol)- "Everything we need (almost!), everywhere we want to be..."
Adamantine.mnt (not dmnt, or dmnd for 'Diamond' 8-) is a copyright-protected diamondoid carbon-based design protocol. C, or Carbon.cdp is a similar, also copyrighted protocol shared by a consortium of public and private entities.
Protean.ptn and Banana.bnn are protein-based design protocols. Protean is copyright-protected and Banana is open-source.
Feldspar and Adamantine in this scenario would be competing to bring smart materials to market, and the latter is also competing with the 'soft' MNT to create universal assemblers, which I really doubt we'll see until the last half of the century (and therefore I'm probably wrong 8-). Feldspar and Adamantine aren't purely silicate- or carbon-based, but the materials are, and would be about products. Protean and Banana (B-eh? N-eh? N-eh?), the soft nanotech, and also involve genetic engineering, and integration. What I think I'm doing is simplifying a chaotic future, ten-twenty years on...
So, can we form long-chain inorganic silicate polymers? If we can, would they be a good replacement for plastics? It's what I'm thinking about, for the 73 Part Development of the Solar System... Assume that this is twice as heavy as mylar, but we can incorporate amorphous silicon-on-silicate (PV, 9-10% efficiency, at a daily are of 6 KW-hr/m^2 per, call it .57 KW-hr/m^2, ~18 MW-hr for a 100 meter sphere) into the structural sheeting for our aerostat. Mine the surface of Venus with robotic airships, export nitrogen and carbon, build with aluminosilicates that we can expect are in abundance in the planetary regolith.
Hydrocarbons don't go away, and neither do plastics, but they would be replaced as feedstock becomes more valuable as food (fertilizers) and scarce and dear. Replace the original plastic solar power bubbles with silicates, glass-fiber or fiberglass, and with amorphous silicon(thin film solar cells)-on-silicate structural sheeting. Build the Billig Tower (Climate Control/Dehumidifier) out of a small mountain of slag and mine-tailings.
Designed to provide water and hydroelectric power, and also hurricane deflection. Everyone will want one, and the cities not protected by one will demand that Atlanta or Jacksonville stop aiming storms at them!
But back to those 43 of fifty atoms; they make up silly silicates (ceramics, glass and stone) and aluminosilicates (like the mineral feldspar), since Aluminum will cut in on Silicon, by turns rudely or politely, and make Geology, and the chemistry of the same, so much more interesting. In molecular nanotechnology Carbon is king, but it has problems. It oxidizes or burns; despite being strong and doing neat 3-D tricks, it doesn't do some things very well. It doesn't self-assemble like proteins will, or silicates. Silica forms strings and chains and sheets; leaves voids useful for sifting and for cabling with other polymers on the small and on the sly. It's what lab chemistry happens inside of, in the form of glass, or on. We historically have built with it, shaped and fired it, formed it into molten glass, and molested it chemically to make photovoltaic cells. It's everything, pretty much, that we need it to be, and it's everywhere, out there in space or on the Earth, that we want to be!
The last time I thought much about MNT design, I assumed that, like anything else, people would back different approaches with their time and money. Some of the futurists made it sound like the hardware and software of each approach would be like a software language and hardware platform, like the Old Wintel duopoly vs. Mac and Linux; now Google Android/Linux versus Apple, so-
Feldspar.adp (Aluminosilicate Design Protocol)- "Everything we need (almost!), everywhere we want to be..."
Adamantine.mnt (not dmnt, or dmnd for 'Diamond' 8-) is a copyright-protected diamondoid carbon-based design protocol. C, or Carbon.cdp is a similar, also copyrighted protocol shared by a consortium of public and private entities.
Protean.ptn and Banana.bnn are protein-based design protocols. Protean is copyright-protected and Banana is open-source.
Feldspar and Adamantine in this scenario would be competing to bring smart materials to market, and the latter is also competing with the 'soft' MNT to create universal assemblers, which I really doubt we'll see until the last half of the century (and therefore I'm probably wrong 8-). Feldspar and Adamantine aren't purely silicate- or carbon-based, but the materials are, and would be about products. Protean and Banana (B-eh? N-eh? N-eh?), the soft nanotech, and also involve genetic engineering, and integration. What I think I'm doing is simplifying a chaotic future, ten-twenty years on...
So, can we form long-chain inorganic silicate polymers? If we can, would they be a good replacement for plastics? It's what I'm thinking about, for the 73 Part Development of the Solar System... Assume that this is twice as heavy as mylar, but we can incorporate amorphous silicon-on-silicate (PV, 9-10% efficiency, at a daily are of 6 KW-hr/m^2 per, call it .57 KW-hr/m^2, ~18 MW-hr for a 100 meter sphere) into the structural sheeting for our aerostat. Mine the surface of Venus with robotic airships, export nitrogen and carbon, build with aluminosilicates that we can expect are in abundance in the planetary regolith.
Hydrocarbons don't go away, and neither do plastics, but they would be replaced as feedstock becomes more valuable as food (fertilizers) and scarce and dear. Replace the original plastic solar power bubbles with silicates, glass-fiber or fiberglass, and with amorphous silicon(thin film solar cells)-on-silicate structural sheeting. Build the Billig Tower (Climate Control/Dehumidifier) out of a small mountain of slag and mine-tailings.
Designed to provide water and hydroelectric power, and also hurricane deflection. Everyone will want one, and the cities not protected by one will demand that Atlanta or Jacksonville stop aiming storms at them!
The Return of Benedict Strange
... and The Committee on WTF2D@BS???
I've been running a supers game set in 1930 Chicago for a month now and was lost as to what to do next, but we ended well last night with a good cliffhanger for what has turned into a pulpy horror game (my fault- Brett wanted an archeologist with supernatural powers, and that suggested Cthulhu to me! 8-)...
A few notes on last night's Thrilling 30's Game-
The remains of Benedict Strange apparently reanimated and Strange took over Art Miller, big strapping young lad, former football-player. Back on track for a medical degree, working part-time with the Coroner's Office as a gofer. BS-Miller attacked and might have killed Ramirez, but was interrupted and Ramirez fought it off.
How did R survive? Why did the interruption and the resistance matter? What is special, if anything, about R?
Why was BS-Miller plus the cop supercharged? What is the connection between Strange and the Murders-on(along)-the-Bus(-route) Killer?
Victor Ramirez drifted in an out of it all day. The last clear memory was of pain and shock, and of pure horror. He had nightmares, again and again, where that college kid, Arthur Miller, had come out of the cold lockup. Ramirez had resented him, but not too much; he was a good kid and liked to joke around. In the dream, the nightmare, he had called out to the six-two former quarterback, and the giant had turned to the coroners' assistant with empty eyes, those big baby-blues washed out and utterly cold, devoid of life. Ramirez took a step back as something oily and malevolent seemed to flow into and fill those windows onto a deeper darkness...
Ramirez had tried to run then, far too late. A shockingly tight grip had taken hold of his right arm, had wrenched it in its socket, had all but torn it from his shoulder. Ramirez had struck out wildly, hit the thing which wasn't Artie in the chest, once, twice, three times, screaming, but the fourth, weakest hit had somehow had some effect. The monster staggered heavily, and let go. Ramirez had fallen, in too much pain to focus, but he had heard voices and the monster went away, along with consciousness.
That came and went through the rest of the morning. There was blood, lots of it, and hard-bitten nurses crying out at the sight of him, a surgeon, a finely skilled cutter whose eyes lit up at the challenge, muttering, "This will take a few deft stitches, won't it? Veins and arteries and tendons, oh yes..."
Shock gave way to blissful morphine. He remembered the pale winter-afternoon sun on the wall and people talking about him as if he wasn't there, which mostly he wasn't. Then darkness with a little back-scatter from the street-lights outside. The hospital rhythms slowed, and the hospital inhabitants, mostly, slept.
In that long stretch between midnight and dawn his morphine drip grew thin and ran down. The pain was his friend, however; without it, as the hours dragged and he puzzled out sounds, pieced together what must have happened, he would never have had any chance at all.
The right arm was a mess, but it was still there, and he felt a weak pulse through chilly fingertips. He wasn't fool enough to try to unwrap the dressings, but yeah, it was still there. Pain radiated from deep bone-bruises, sutures, an abused socket and tendons. Still there, he thought with a hysterical chuckle. "Madre dios!"
There was a cop at the open door who ducked his head into the room. "You awake? I'll get a nurse-" But he stiffened and grabbed his pistol a he turned back to the hallway. "Who's there?"
No answer. But Ramirez felt the darkness, a deeper darkness, gather itself out there, and he felt fear.
There were two quick shots without a warning. Panic or good instincts, and Ramirez was inclined to think it was the latter, but the third shot was muffled, and then the cop struggled with something, gun hand forced up, twisted. There was a horrible crack and meaty crunches as the cop screamed, but then the other monstrous hand was up under the cops' chin, squeezing the life out of him at the throat and twisting, breaking things, forcing the head around, likewise at an unnatural angle. A voice full of gravel, but still barely recognizable as Artie's, once, said, "You won't be neeee-ding that anyyyy-moooor."
The cops' head separated from his body, spraying blood. The thing licked spatter from its lips and smiled at Ramirez as it set the head on his right shoulder, and smooshed it into the back of its' own, back to back and just a little bit off-center. Then it proceeded to loot the body some more.
Ramirez realized that at least some of the screaming was his own.
I've been running a supers game set in 1930 Chicago for a month now and was lost as to what to do next, but we ended well last night with a good cliffhanger for what has turned into a pulpy horror game (my fault- Brett wanted an archeologist with supernatural powers, and that suggested Cthulhu to me! 8-)...
A few notes on last night's Thrilling 30's Game-
The remains of Benedict Strange apparently reanimated and Strange took over Art Miller, big strapping young lad, former football-player. Back on track for a medical degree, working part-time with the Coroner's Office as a gofer. BS-Miller attacked and might have killed Ramirez, but was interrupted and Ramirez fought it off.
How did R survive? Why did the interruption and the resistance matter? What is special, if anything, about R?
Why was BS-Miller plus the cop supercharged? What is the connection between Strange and the Murders-on(along)-the-Bus(-route) Killer?
Victor Ramirez drifted in an out of it all day. The last clear memory was of pain and shock, and of pure horror. He had nightmares, again and again, where that college kid, Arthur Miller, had come out of the cold lockup. Ramirez had resented him, but not too much; he was a good kid and liked to joke around. In the dream, the nightmare, he had called out to the six-two former quarterback, and the giant had turned to the coroners' assistant with empty eyes, those big baby-blues washed out and utterly cold, devoid of life. Ramirez took a step back as something oily and malevolent seemed to flow into and fill those windows onto a deeper darkness...
Ramirez had tried to run then, far too late. A shockingly tight grip had taken hold of his right arm, had wrenched it in its socket, had all but torn it from his shoulder. Ramirez had struck out wildly, hit the thing which wasn't Artie in the chest, once, twice, three times, screaming, but the fourth, weakest hit had somehow had some effect. The monster staggered heavily, and let go. Ramirez had fallen, in too much pain to focus, but he had heard voices and the monster went away, along with consciousness.
That came and went through the rest of the morning. There was blood, lots of it, and hard-bitten nurses crying out at the sight of him, a surgeon, a finely skilled cutter whose eyes lit up at the challenge, muttering, "This will take a few deft stitches, won't it? Veins and arteries and tendons, oh yes..."
Shock gave way to blissful morphine. He remembered the pale winter-afternoon sun on the wall and people talking about him as if he wasn't there, which mostly he wasn't. Then darkness with a little back-scatter from the street-lights outside. The hospital rhythms slowed, and the hospital inhabitants, mostly, slept.
In that long stretch between midnight and dawn his morphine drip grew thin and ran down. The pain was his friend, however; without it, as the hours dragged and he puzzled out sounds, pieced together what must have happened, he would never have had any chance at all.
The right arm was a mess, but it was still there, and he felt a weak pulse through chilly fingertips. He wasn't fool enough to try to unwrap the dressings, but yeah, it was still there. Pain radiated from deep bone-bruises, sutures, an abused socket and tendons. Still there, he thought with a hysterical chuckle. "Madre dios!"
There was a cop at the open door who ducked his head into the room. "You awake? I'll get a nurse-" But he stiffened and grabbed his pistol a he turned back to the hallway. "Who's there?"
No answer. But Ramirez felt the darkness, a deeper darkness, gather itself out there, and he felt fear.
There were two quick shots without a warning. Panic or good instincts, and Ramirez was inclined to think it was the latter, but the third shot was muffled, and then the cop struggled with something, gun hand forced up, twisted. There was a horrible crack and meaty crunches as the cop screamed, but then the other monstrous hand was up under the cops' chin, squeezing the life out of him at the throat and twisting, breaking things, forcing the head around, likewise at an unnatural angle. A voice full of gravel, but still barely recognizable as Artie's, once, said, "You won't be neeee-ding that anyyyy-moooor."
The cops' head separated from his body, spraying blood. The thing licked spatter from its lips and smiled at Ramirez as it set the head on his right shoulder, and smooshed it into the back of its' own, back to back and just a little bit off-center. Then it proceeded to loot the body some more.
Ramirez realized that at least some of the screaming was his own.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Cheap access to Space
I've been looking at Birch's space schemes yet again... everything from the orbital ring system, to dynamic suspension members and terraforming Venus and Mars. I don't have the math or engineering background, but I like how he talks about actually paying for all this blue sky!
Basically, there has to be a way to provide and pay for cheap access to space. My Solar Power Bubbles provide highly mobile power generation and is a 'mad scheme' which should pay for itself, without really being 'blue-sky'. Modifying the idea to build a soft, inflatable version of the Billig Tower, to provide localized climate control, starving hurricanes of moisture and steering them away from cities and coast-lines, while also providing drinking water and hydropower, is 'blue', but a logical next step. Launch services from altitude for micro-satellites is a deeper blue, but most 'blue-sky' of all is a mass- or Free Electron Laser-beam launching orbiters.
That's what I'd expect of the nano-slick; in fact, I've been there, done that, and I'm going to run through it again. A massive flock of 60 meter nano-slick bubbles, each with a free-electron laser or maser, focusing power on the underside of a myrabo lightship, or ablating carbon-fibers or polymers off of the backside of the orbiter... how do you make FEL??? I'm going to wave my hands and assume carbon-stuff can be formed into a phased array FEL and go back to the flock, lighting up the backside of a dense plastic disk, or cone for stability. Power wastage is a major sin, but we have a lot of capacity...
A meter cone orbiter is 1m*1/2m^2*pi/3 or pi/12m^3, approximately 11/42, call it 1/4m^3 and density of 1.2 g/cc, or 300 kg. We're leaving the engine at home, ablating material off of the orbiter and guesstimating a specific impulse of 260 seconds, call it all of 250 m/s^2 (which sucks! 8-), but our fuel and payload are one and the same for this example; payload is just what's left of the cone when it reaches orbit and re-circularizes, somehow... nearly 8 kilos to 9500 m/s, a payload fraction of a little over 2%. Scale up, make the thing a double cone 3m wide and 3m long,and it's 8 1/2 tonnes at launch, 200 kg into orbit (Vinny-rated, in other words...).
Power to feed the drive is ~10 times (250m/s)^2*8500kg, or 553 billion joules, 154 MW-hr of electricity, over four hours output from a 585m nano-slick bubble. The polymer and payload are trivial outputs for one of those; they produce 99 tonnes of nano-slick material or other carbon-stuff every day. Even for 1km solar power bubble, that's still over six hours of electrical production, worth over $15K at ten cents a KW-hr.
Basically, there has to be a way to provide and pay for cheap access to space. My Solar Power Bubbles provide highly mobile power generation and is a 'mad scheme' which should pay for itself, without really being 'blue-sky'. Modifying the idea to build a soft, inflatable version of the Billig Tower, to provide localized climate control, starving hurricanes of moisture and steering them away from cities and coast-lines, while also providing drinking water and hydropower, is 'blue', but a logical next step. Launch services from altitude for micro-satellites is a deeper blue, but most 'blue-sky' of all is a mass- or Free Electron Laser-beam launching orbiters.
That's what I'd expect of the nano-slick; in fact, I've been there, done that, and I'm going to run through it again. A massive flock of 60 meter nano-slick bubbles, each with a free-electron laser or maser, focusing power on the underside of a myrabo lightship, or ablating carbon-fibers or polymers off of the backside of the orbiter... how do you make FEL??? I'm going to wave my hands and assume carbon-stuff can be formed into a phased array FEL and go back to the flock, lighting up the backside of a dense plastic disk, or cone for stability. Power wastage is a major sin, but we have a lot of capacity...
A meter cone orbiter is 1m*1/2m^2*pi/3 or pi/12m^3, approximately 11/42, call it 1/4m^3 and density of 1.2 g/cc, or 300 kg. We're leaving the engine at home, ablating material off of the orbiter and guesstimating a specific impulse of 260 seconds, call it all of 250 m/s^2 (which sucks! 8-), but our fuel and payload are one and the same for this example; payload is just what's left of the cone when it reaches orbit and re-circularizes, somehow... nearly 8 kilos to 9500 m/s, a payload fraction of a little over 2%. Scale up, make the thing a double cone 3m wide and 3m long,and it's 8 1/2 tonnes at launch, 200 kg into orbit (Vinny-rated, in other words...).
Power to feed the drive is ~10 times (250m/s)^2*8500kg, or 553 billion joules, 154 MW-hr of electricity, over four hours output from a 585m nano-slick bubble. The polymer and payload are trivial outputs for one of those; they produce 99 tonnes of nano-slick material or other carbon-stuff every day. Even for 1km solar power bubble, that's still over six hours of electrical production, worth over $15K at ten cents a KW-hr.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Johnny Nanoseed
I spent some time working on this tonight, when I should have been writing! But it was fun to noodle around, and I've got some ideas for a story or two out of it-
http://freepdfhosting.com/d809c3120e.pdf
(Let's see how this works)
http://freepdfhosting.com/d809c3120e.pdf
(Let's see how this works)
Friday, January 6, 2012
MNT, Again
I've been revisiting my nano-slick thought-experiment. The latest version, with certain limitations, grows to three-quarters of the surface area of the Moon or Africa, continent-sized, although it's spread out enough so that it doesn't kill off the ecosystem of the ocean it floats on...
My power numbers were a little off, by an order of magnitude, but the 'patch' still produces five-sixths of current energy use. Getting it where we need it and in the form in which we currently use it is problematic, as is all the change we are necessarily bringing about, which is what I can write about, of course!
But I am a damn silly fat man and like my comfort, part of which is that I dislike the thought of others in want. I would like for them to have the same standard of living I take for granted, or the equivalent. I think that, in general, people should leave other people the hell alone. I don't expect for people not to be people; I know the damned human race much too well to expect saints. But the sinners can go about their business as they like, provided that they leave each other in peace. 'An none be harmed, do as thou will.'
To begin with, this is about Humanity. With all due respect to environmentalists, Earth is the Mother of Man and Woman, and while it can do perfectly well without us, and is being harmed by us, short of total nuclear war, we can't really destroy the planet (and even then...). We can destroy human technological civilization, crash the population and reduce it to subsistence, a hand to mouth existence based on muscle-power and scavenged tech. I am concerned with the quality of human life, and therefore, like Abraham Lincoln, I guess I'm a humanitarian. To paraphrase him, I would do anything to guarantee the survival of my species, which I both love, hate, fear and yet still, I hope for. If I could guarantee a handful would survive to start over elsewhere, I would. If I felt the necessity to destroy my own people, and to allow a xenophobic collectivist culture to take the lead for the next little while, I would do it.
The 0th rabbit out of my hat is the nano-slick, which I did a lot of hand waving about. It would be the culmination of years of work by thousands and cost billions of dollars. But all of the necessary capabilities are within the realm of the possible- carbon-fibers, structural diamond, carbon-based PV cells (failing that, thermo-electrostatic Stirling Engines!), carbon dioxide electrolysis, even harvesting methane clathrates as fuel and feedstock (build your own private robot navy on a nearby seabed)! The 1st rabbit is more hand-wavium, the food-maker. Here I assume that carbohydrates, vitamins, fats and fillers could be made and processed into serviceable food-stuffs. I imagine it would give Iron Chef a whole new lease on life and reality TV... The 2nd rabbit, the hydrogen airship, half a billion vehicles with a ton of cargo capacity, is more of the same.
What does a human being need to live and be comfortable, day to day? Forget about work, something useful worth the doing, and excitement versus ennui... I think we really won't have to worry about boredom. Plenty upsets everything and we still would be living in interesting times, only more weird and wonderful yet!
We need water, gallons of clean, potable H20 for drinking, cleaning, etc. Food of course, and a comfortable climate, clean air that is warmed or cooled from ambient temperatures, about 30 KW-hr of electricity per day, transport, bandwidth and infotainment...
Let's say we need 100 gallons of water, per person, per day, about 400 liters. We can gather it from the aquifer, if there is one, desalinate or sterilize sea or waste-water, collect the precipitation which falls on our homes (call that a 200 m^2 times 760 mm per year (per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_rainfall_climatology, general), 152 tonnes, ~2900 kg a week, or 414 liters per day), or produce hydrogen elsewhere, ship it in and burn it with oxygen. For 400 liters/kg of water, we need ~44 kg of hydrogen, in a H2 airship tanker, perhaps with water ballast- 40 kg of H2 and 40 kg or H20! Since 2 kg of H2 provide 26.8 kg of lift, this should be very easy to achieve.
Food is satisfied with the food-maker, a handy little number that manufactures a couple kg of proteins, carbohydrates, fats, sugars, vitamins, fillers and other things into tasty, delectable eats (or I'll turn the food science dude and a platoon of iron chefs lose on the problem! 8-). Input raw feed stock or try not to think about the probably source of the organics, add more energy whilst breaking the molecules down into more basic chemicals and heat-sterilizing, and then reassemble into the aforementioned sugars, fats, carbs, proteins vitamins and fillers.
Climate control assumes there is a space, a volume and area within which each person is living. A dome, an A-frame, or a boring salt-box with a hipped roof and gutters, all with a 100 m^2 footprint (this works out to ~1,000 SF, a 'starter' house. A four-person family home of 4K). The simplest design is a 10 meter square, >5 m ceilings, a 30 degree, hipped roof with a 7.5 m peak. Or a 12.5 by 8 meter rectangle, 5 meters plus a hipped roof and 3.125 m peak. Or an L-shaped (or any other arrangement of four 5 m square elements), 15 by 10 meter job, with a 6.25 m peak.
The structural members are articulated, so that it can self-assemble on site, move mass around within, and open or close doors or windows. Want a moon-roof, or a sliding wall partition? Got it. There are 'triple-pane' walls of the same nano-slick, reformatted as a wall, a door or whatever, 3 cm thick, 1.11 g/cm^2, 11.1 kg/m^2. A 500 m^3 box with no roof (or an apartment in a cityscape) masses 4,440 kg, less internal compartments, 6,660 kg with four 5 m square elements.
Monday, December 19, 2011
Looking Into the Near Future
In SF, we tend to look a few hundred years into the future, and deal in starships and extrasolar worlds. I've always wanted to look out into the Solar System, the real estate of the Real Future, and I've been looking over George Friedman's shoulder, into his crystal ball, particularly his last two books, 'The Next Decade' and rereading 'The Next 100 Years' (they sound like the same book, but the difference of focus is key, and he looks more closely at Brazil in 'TND', a country I expect to see as a major space power), trying to come up with a new near future setting, one that doesn't involve hand-wavium and near-magic, but does involve the development of the Moon and the NEAs...
He thinks we will have to re-fight the cold war with Russia, in miniature, on more time... supporting Poland and Eastern Europe against a resurgent Russia, while Germany and Western Europe stays out of it. Later, Eastern Europe and Turkey would expand into the region, physically or at least economically dominating things, especially Turkey, whose time has come round again, thanks in part to the mess we have left in Iraq and the Arab Spring (too soon for GF to have added that to his speculations in 'The Next Decade', but I can read the tea leaves a little bit, too 8-).
Brazil, in South America, and Angola, in Africa, both have a special relationship (BrazAnga!). They are Portuguese-speaking countries, and Angola has cheap labor and resources Brazil needs as it reaches its internal limits and looks around to outsource some of its economy, like we did, to China and elsewhere, and which China in turn did to SE Asia. I think that maybe in the late 21st C, the US, which considers the Pacific to be its personal lake, at least from Hawaii back to the mainland, and the North Atlantic to be a 'pond', will acquiesce to Brazilian South Atlantic power. Turkey will be a regional naval power, from the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf, all places that the US is less and less interested in any more. India will probably be our proxy in the IO by the late 21st Century.
Coastal and South China will call the shots in the future, not Beijing. It is cruising for a bruising right now, crony capitalism on steroids, with bad debts at 25% to 40%, twice what Japan experienced in the 90's. The only question is how far it will fall apart, and how far the central government will go to crush dissent a generation after Tienamen Square.
By my musings, the US is still the big guy at the end of the 21st C, with a 1/4 Quadrillon dollars GNP, but the Gross World Product may be $1.5 to $2 Q at this point, because I'm sure everybody who can is growing just a little bit faster than the Big Dog, over a long time. Even if the GWP is $1 Quadrillion, no worries; that's still ~20 times what it is today, and it implies a new source of energy, probably offworld solar or He3, or both. For the US, we'll be fracking for natural gas and using more coal in the near future, and dealing with the environmental damage, as and when. Per-maybe-haps we'll come around to nukes in a can, and 'burn' up some of our nuclear waste before that ticking time bomb goes off; maybe. But at some point we will need to look up, and go up and out, to secure the new source of power we'll need in the next hundred years.
The numbers are pure fantasy, grounded in my imperfect understanding of what I've read and my prejudices, but they imply that all but one of the 'Next Five' will be in Eurasia- Turkey, India, (South) China, and Japan, all nicely balancing each other so that there is no dominant Eurasian power. Brazil is probably more troublesome, a South Atlantic power with a foothold in Africa, but Nigeria, South Africa and Argentina are available to oppose it, and Poland (which will lead Eastern Europe against Russia, get lots of goodies, but not all, after it falls apart, and protect a declining Western Europe by default), Iran, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines will serve as buffer states elsewhere. Australia will probably be looking for a friend, now and always, and we can keep her, if we play nice. Turkey controls much of the Middle East and as much of North Africa as it can, hemmed in by Poland, Nigeria and Iran, and rattling sabers with India.
What I've taken away from the two books looks like this- China and Russia crumble due to wars and internal troubles. Russia is dismembered and marginalized by Turkey and Eastern Europe; Japan gets Maritime Russia in the West as a protectorate. It also develops interests in coastal China, as does everybody else. As time goes on, Turkey and Japan become regional powers, offset by Poland, Eastern Europe, and Iran in the West and by India, China and United Korea in the East. Turkey probably guarantees Japan's access to Saudi oil for a little while longer, but everybody will be kicking the hydrocarbon habit eventually.
In the thirties Brazil is growing as a power across the South Atlantic in Angola and southern Africa. The US moves to oppose this through Argentina, South Africa and Nigeria, already a regional power and now beginning to really grow, industrially, the fruits of stability and investment in education and infrastructure is paying off in a take-off like Brazil now. It has a similar size population, but a long way to grow to catch up.
I have Brazil growing explosively in my spreadsheet, so it will look like a threat on our front door step, too close to ignore. The US will over-react, leading to a nazi-fication of Brazil in the media, and we will probably be preoccupied with the South Atlantic while Turkey is growing into a potential problem. GF has Turkey and Japan trying to develop spheres of interest in Eurasia, which the US will oppose, having seen off Russia and China as threats and we never want to see any one country dominating the 'world island', and becoming a threat to American power. If they ally and act together, as GF have them doing in 2050, they could achieve their goals, or just a likely get smacked down. The US would go to India, a resurgent and re-aligned China, and smaller regional powers like Poland, as counterweights, allies and proxies.
In the long run, just a gut feeling, but I think that Brazil and Japan will be space powers. I don't see Japan going away, but I do see it having another 'lost decade' if it does go down to defeat, as GF has them doing in the 2050 War. China, India, and Turkey, too, for I don't think you can grow in the last half of 21st Century without space power, either force or energy. Countries that don't go into space will eventually be marginalized, like Russia, and become either victims or quaint backwaters.
In 2050 the 'Big 4' are the USA, Japan and China, who have swapped places again, followed closely by Brazil. Again, these numbers are pure fabrication, but I can work with this. The US economy is three times as big as it is today, and the population is a third larger (there are about half a billion people in North America, just as the population of Europe has fallen towards half a billion). All three are about half as big as the US, and bigger, economically, than the USA is today, great powers with suborbital space planes, oh my. Turkey and India are not far behind; watching each other uneasily in Central Asia and the Indian Ocean, plus their combined weight is about equal to any of the preceding three. The next five economies after the US add up to nearly twice its economic power.
George Friedman doesn't address this, but I will. From this point on, space power and dominance becomes imperative. The US will still try to control the seas, as a great trading power, but in the last half of the 21st Century we might see the US making territorial claims on the Moon because it is the new high ground. As an American, I say- 'Sweet!' But as a human being, I say- 'Oh shit.'
My model has the US growing quickly in the 50s and 60s, fueled by cheap energy and lots of it, plus developing heavy orbital industry. China rides along, Japan turns aside for a little bit, and Brazil also loses its way for a while. Turkey and India both grow quickly, with Turkey growing into its empire and realizing untapped potential in a stabilized Middle East. India is still industrializing on the ground, but growing into space as well.
China pulls ahead of Japan again, Brazil powers up and gains on China, a long stern chase through the seventies and eighties. During this time, GF sees a crisis unfolding with Mexico and the borderland in the Southwest, so I throttle the American economy back a little. Seven decades from now it's ten times as big. As it is now, China's is nearly half as big, as is Brazil's. These two are no threat to each other and share enemies, plus a resentment of nearly a century of American power; its hubris and carelessness. They are both interested in space power, and may force some sort of concession. It's hard to imagine the balance of power system falling apart, but they might back each other against the USA, leading to a world of squabbling great powers that can make the former superpower back off.
Oh shit, squared.
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