New Mars Forums

I wonder if an amnesty bill could get through Congress with the proviso that anyone who takes advantage of it will be barred from American citizenship - - if they want a pathway to citizenship, they have to leave the country and reenter legally. Provides amnesty whilst still providing some kind of consequence for illegal immigration.

The Op is about drilling (well, partly blasting) through rock. But many places where we would like to tunnel, both on and off earth, involve building tunnels in soil, which requires supports to be built either as we go or before hand. I haven't found anything about the application of microwaves in this case, even though they've been considered as a way to sinter lunar souls to produce infrastructure.

If sufficient heat could be applied in the right location, a temporary structure could be sintered through the soil, which could then be excavated. Most applicable in clay soils, where the temperature requirements are lower and the brick produced AFAIK is stronger, but potentially doable in sand and gravel soils too, such as those found south of the Thames. Heat could be delivered via microwaves, but also direct heating elements - - bricks are fired at a temperature comfortably below the melting point of steel, so steel rods could perhaps be rammed through the soil before running high currents through them to heat the surrounding clay. Sand and gravel would be harder, but even then it might be an option - - perhaps graphite? The heating elements would be sacrificial, so they have to be cheap and disposable. With microwaves, a combination with a tunnelling shield could work. Sinter the tunnel a metre or so ahead, excavate it, move forward, and repeat.

I don't expect the tunnels produced to be used as is, but it would make the installation or construction of a permanent structure far easier.

Re. nuclear waste heat and boreholes, it seems that every option for heating besides direct nuclear (which presumably can be throttled over a year) would benefit from some means of interseasonal storage. If we're relying on reactors for electricity, that heat is being wasted in summer.

What's the waste heat production for Britain's current reactors, 10GW? I know they provide about 5GW of power. If some means of storing that heat was available, would the existing fleet be enough, combined with actually insulated houses?

The boreholes (storage) and network (distribution) concept seems to be pretty agnostic about what the source of heat is. Which is a bonus, because it doesn't become a stranded asset if we decide to pursue a different heat source. The systems in Europe have proven this.

The difficulty of and resource intensity of (fast) interstellar travel, coupled with the sheer abundance of our own solar system, would seem to work against interstellar colonisation for resource reasons. That leaves fringe groups who want to settle it for ideological reasons -- and fringe groups are usually not that well resourced (see the Expanse's Mormons for an exception).

Slowboats and island hopping otoh, that could be different. But also far far slower. A civilisation expanding at 0.01% of the speed of light could settle the entire galaxy in about... 10 billion years.

Settling the solar system, that seems to be something within our technological capabilities. We can still have our space opera future

Carnforth is less than 10 miles from Heysham 1 and 2   The whole district (whole bay?) could be heated by nuclear, the sticking point is the ridiculous Green Party that's in power there.

EDIT: Or maybe not. City Council leader urges support for extension of Heysham 1 & 2

th, if you follow the link Calliban posted it will be explained. Like I said this is well established technology, heat will be exchanged however heat is exchanged in those systems, though the particulars do not matter at this point anymore than you need to understand semiconductors to post here.

A single borehole is already proven. Several boreholes are proven. The reason for multiple boreholes at once is that just getting the equipment in for one represents a major fraction of the cost; it's about amortising that cost over multiple. None of this stuff is new, including using the boreholes for storage, except maybe a butane based heat pump.

Thermal storage is simply reversing the flow of heat. Instead of circulating cold fluid during the winter to extract heat from the borehole, you circulate warm fluid during the summer to put heat in.

Oh I wasn't suggesting circulating it through the entire system. Just the borehole. During summer we can move heat from the bottom to (almost) the entire length. That will allow us to extract at a far better rate come winter - - we're using the borehole itself as a thermal battery to make use of it's capacity during the summer.

Re. Costs, I've seen borehole costs from £50-100 per metre to £1000. How deep can we drill before going above £100 per metre? What is the optimum depth to drill to based on cost? A 500m borehole would still give better performance than summer seawater.

Very important to note this is only the connectome. It's the equivalent of the London Underground map, for the brain. As far as actually modelling the brain goes, we still haven't uploaded a C. elegans worm yet. Despite the singularitarians insisting that it will be next year for a decade now

It is quite remarkable that language turned out to use so little processing power. I'm sure ChatGPT uses less compute than a fly brain possesses.

I would see this planet ringed in solar power satellites in a twilight (dawn til dusk) orbit. There is a lot of potential area there to capture sunlight, far more than Terra has on her surface.

Doesn't have to be beamed down to be useful. Lot's of energy intensive work to be doing in space that can produce downportable resources, such as aluminum. But also of course thinks like pushing beamed spacecraft to high speeds and manufacturing nanorods for terraforming Mars.

L4/5 are probably better for that if we're using Lunar resources though. Constant line of sight to surface receivers, no atmosphere to get in the way, very brief eclipses every month when it passes through the shadow of Terra. I'm sure folks will gripe about the appearence of two new stars following and leading Luna though.

You also have a lot of permafrost. Should any methane releases from that be charged to your account then?

OTOH, there's still a fair bit of room for automation in a lot of work. Which will also necessitate a shift away from a 40hr work week for everyone model, but it does mean that there'll need to be far fewer people involved in energy intensive sectors that have to adjust working hours to match the weather.

"One big building" doesn't have to be an apartment block. Functionally, a block of terraced houses counts as a single building. And apartments can still have their own external entrances (e.g. cottage flats). A block of eight terraced houses could be insulated as one and have a shared heating system. Of course, as we've talked about many times, hot water should be pretty cheap... and electricity is expensive, but is only needed in fairly small quantities.

It's mechanical power that's the bottleneck here really. Well, and high grade heat as well. So we can still have baths, but brick manufacture is going to struggle. Freight transport can be buffered; passenger transport cannot. That said, for things that can be buffered we might be able to use them as dump loads to maintain a minimum level of service e.g. diverting power from bulk freight to passenger rail so that people can still get where they need to go. And we could even keep cars, and accept that some weeks we'll be leaving them at home and taking the train instead because there's not enough fuel...

I'm still very much in favour of building out universal basic infrastructure though, even if I don't think it should be primary, instead of a fallback position. It's good to have options, and if people aren't willing to build for intermittency before they're forced to it will be necessary to build it so society has something to fall back on when it finally hits them.