Sergey: In Soviet Russia, Rocket Detonates You!

Ships haven't gotten all that much faster over the years; modern container ships are only about twice as fast as the last clipper ships, not ten or a hundred or a thousand times as fast.

That's only because nobody cares about making them faster. They already run them slower [bloomberg.com] than their maximum speed intentionally because the primary design consideration for container ships is efficiency, not speed. And if you look at the amount of freight transported per ship and per crew member compared to a clipper ship, I suspect it is in the range of ten to a hundred times more.

But let's assume you're right:

rockets are a mature technology, like ships and aircraft.

OK, so don't use rockets. I keep hearing about this magic carbon nanotube space elevator that we'll have Real Soon Now.

Even if you want to assume that never happens, let's consider another alternative: You pick a proverbial "asteroid the size of Texas" out of the many floating around out there. Find one in the habitable zone. Then you send a team there with some industrial equipment, not to mine the asteroid and bring it home, but to mine it and use the raw materials to construct a large compartmentalized living environment. Start off by building a few dozen acres of greenhouse, and fill it with plants so that you have food and oxygen recycling. Then proceed to build yourself a little home away from home -- but in a place that has lower gravity, so that you can build yourself a space elevator. Create yourself a city in space with a population of a few thousand people.

That gives you a foothold. You create an industrial city that can export its products to the universe without burning ten thousand gallons of fuel fighting gravity. Then you can branch out. Colonize and mine more asteroids and small planets. Once you have a large enough industrial capacity in low gravity areas, you can build yourself a city-to-go and just land the entire thing piecemeal on a suitable planet. Next thing you know you've got a million people living on Mars and several expeditions on their way to colonizing habitable planets in other planetary systems.

I'm not saying what I've just laid out would definitely work. Maybe, maybe not. What I'm saying is that we haven't yet exhausted all the possible alternatives, so giving up now is nothing but defeatism.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/jyH1mgG5yDc/sergey-in-soviet-russia-rocket-detonates-you

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