Atomic Razor

Self-Sustaining Settlements

I just finished Thomas Thwaites's The Toaster Project, which is excellent. I reminded of that realisation I had school that every artificial thing in the world was made by tools that had been by more primitive tools. right back to the point where all you have is whatever you can find lying around in the environment. Also the later realisation that everything in the world that is made must also be sold. Thwaites necessarily cheats in making his toaster and he never actually toasts any bread with it. He was at the Royal College of Art, but talks to Jan Cilliers at Imperial. I have wondered whether you could build a car, say, from scratch at somewhere like Imperial. Obviously, you could certainly do a lot of stuff in a very well-founded university's laboratories and workshops. "From scratch" is doing a lot of work as Thwaites indicates, but I would imagine you could make plastic from crude oil in Chemistry or Chem Eng or Materials, perhaps Earth Science and Engineering. You could certainly refine metals. This might not be done so much these days, but there must be metallurgy left. So you probably make everything from scratch (from the raw materials) at Imperial, although, of course, you are heavily reliant on a lot of pre-existing equipment, facilities and tools. You could, of course, exclude more advanced technologies and shift things back a couple of tech levels, but not as far as the Paleolithic.

We bought David the Weinersmith's A City on Mars for Christmas because I knew he would like it. Self-sustaining settlements in space are hard for all sorts of reasons and might require magic tech (i.e. true Drexlerian molecular nanotechnology). Of course, you can do a lot on an Antarctic base or an oil rig or a submarine or an aircraft carrier, but you are still dependent on supply chains. You can ship a lot of workshop facilities to Mars. There's doubtless stuff you can do with the stuff lying around there. Obviously, you don't need to be self-sustaining anymore than an Antarctic base or remote city (Perth, say) is. You might want to be because you think the Earth's might get wiped out somehow, but you can just have a greater Solar System supply chain. And, of course, you don't have to worry about polluting space, although you do Mars or the Moon. For interstellar missions, you might want to find yourself a nice comet. Could you have one big enough to last an interstellar voyage of thousands of years (if you hop off to a passing star or an island hop via rogue planets)? You are going to loss some volatiles from your generation ship, but could you have enough of a buffer with your comet for a 1000 people for 10,000 years?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Twelve Months On...

Well, that's depressing. I thought I had posted something here earlier this year, but it seems that it was just over a year since my last entry. I have plenty of ideas for new posts in 2023, not that I can remember what any of them were now. There have been a lot of changes for me in 2023 with a lot more to come in 2024. I am hoping that some of those changes might involve doing more writing, but how am I kidding? Those books won't write themselves, but that was as true in 2006 or 1991. But I have  those two nearly written novels. Something can be done with them. Can't it? Can't it?

Actually, one thing did occur to me that I can recall. Consider all those imaginary friends of mine (I have a lot). We are soon going to arrive at epoch at which is going to be possible for me to finally get to read their books or, at the very least what the eleven tracks of Alan Fredericks's 1999 Mercury Award-winning album Again, from "Again" to "Emily" to "Stop" to "Again (again)" sound like. 

Yes, there's surely a novel in that.