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#1 2014-06-15 07:12:45

karov
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From: Bulgaria
Registered: 2004-06-03
Posts: 953

Nomad planets & Laser stars

1 + 2 = ?

1. :: http://www.newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=365

The sun emits billions of times more light then the budget of Earth.

+

2. :: http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.2687

100 000 planemos per fusor! Indeed they must be millions per star.

? :: Instead of just a handful of solasers - the sun or any other fusor might turn "hairy" of white laser beams illuminating with sniper accuracy EACH and EVERY planet of the millions of its host ( planemo cloud ), with earth level of solar radiation.

In order to power a million worlds the sun must have less then 1/1000th of its surface covered by collectors. Visualize semi-transparent Dyson sphere.

The beams could be used for transport, stellar husbandry, communication, interstellar energy grid, communication (the least)... of course.

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#2 2014-06-15 07:33:34

Terraformer
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From: The Fortunate Isles
Registered: 2007-08-27
Posts: 3,907
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Re: Nomad planets & Laser stars

The laser wastes, a couple light years from the Proxima Dyson sphere?

I will be surprised if you haven't read Lockstep, karov...


Use what is abundant and build to last

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#3 2014-06-15 15:30:29

karov
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From: Bulgaria
Registered: 2004-06-03
Posts: 953

Re: Nomad planets & Laser stars

Terraformer wrote:

I will be surprised if you haven't read Lockstep, karov...

I have read it. Yes. In my "defense" I could only say ( aside from that the book is very good ), that I accessed the primary sources of my ( and most probably Karl's ) inspiration veeery nearly to their first issue dates:

Short list:

1. http://laserstars.org/amateur/scifi.html ( late 1990es or early 2000es )
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiasco_(novel)  -- ( 1990 )
3. http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.2687  ( early 2012 )

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#4 2014-06-15 16:19:51

Terraformer
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From: The Fortunate Isles
Registered: 2007-08-27
Posts: 3,907
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Re: Nomad planets & Laser stars

No need for a defense, it's not an accusation. wink

It's an interesting idea, but I'm doubtful that I - and many others - would be willing to rely on a system 2 light years away for survival. Now, p-p fusion reactors forming artificial suns in orbit, on the other hand...


Use what is abundant and build to last

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#5 2014-06-15 17:56:22

JoshNH4H
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From: Pullman, WA
Registered: 2007-07-15
Posts: 2,564
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Re: Nomad planets & Laser stars

I think that it would probably make sense to have a more redundant system that uses multiple mirrors, only some of which need to be focused at any given time. 

IMO the planet would ideally have a good greenhouse effect so that you don't need that much solar heat to keep the temperature up, and even if insolation is lost entirely for a couple weeks it's not the end of the world, so to speak.

p-p reactors would be a nice technology to have in general if they weren't so damn hard to do outside of a star


-Josh

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#6 2014-06-16 01:36:30

karov
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From: Bulgaria
Registered: 2004-06-03
Posts: 953

Re: Nomad planets & Laser stars

Terraformer wrote:

No need for a defense, it's not an accusation. wink

It's an interesting idea, but I'm doubtful that I - and many others - would be willing to rely on a system 2 light years away for survival. Now, p-p fusion reactors forming artificial suns in orbit, on the other hand...

Thanx. wink

If the system is massivelly redundant - no problem.

compact p-p fusion reactors will open up the WHOLE universe ( and I believe that like in the case of quantum computations in photosynthesis, p-p and any fusion and indeed any nuclear transmutation - is matter of informatics, not brute force! ), but til they come we DO HAVE really massive p-p reactors, the stars.

I remind Freeman Dyson's estimate that using only mirrors (optics) and if the mass of the colony is the restriction for the mass of the mirror(optics), then instantly habitable become any habitat which lies between several solar radii and several lights years from a sun-like fusor.

With lasers properly collimated this expands to really intergalactic distances...

Lenses, mirrors or lasers - it is all optics. WE do have the mighty source, we do have the locations within the Sol's sphere of influence ( coinciding with the Oort cloud in the wide sense of the word, planets - inner or outer are just examples of bigger "comets" in it).

We need to tap only 1/1000th of the Sol's output in order to turn the Solar cloud of astronomical bodies into a nearly million habitable planets!

INDEED, the light tapping system in the Sol's imminent vicinity could comprise supra-solar habitat too ... a-la-Birch.

The capture "plates" could hover like statites on top of the solar poles thus giving millions of km free of lasing "gap" so the classic 8 inner planets to not obstruct / or to get endangered / by the beams. Indeed the tap plates could be cooled by laser cooling, manipulated waste heat disposal...  A "sea urchin/hedgehog" of beams.

I think that it would probably make sense to have a more redundant system that uses multiple mirrors, only some of which need to be focused at any given time.
IMO the planet would ideally have a good greenhouse effect so that you don't need that much solar heat to keep the temperature up, and even if insolation is lost entirely for a couple weeks it's not the end of the world, so to speak.


Yes, the receiver planets would be catered by multitude of beams at any given time, they shall have local optics to manage the influx-outflux, too: Hall weather machines, orbital mirror lenses, anything. Because most of them will be smaller then Mars, this could serve as atmospheric retention systems, too.

Also, why 2 ly?! See the mass distribution in the Oort cloud - most of it, say 80% occupies its inner 20% of the radius.

How much is out there at the edge of our solar system that we have not yet discovered?

S: The short answer is—a lot. The Kuiper belt is probably littered with hundreds, if not thousands, of ice-dwarf planets like Pluto. NASA has explored all four terrestrial planets and all four giant planets. But the number of bodies we’d classify as planets in the solar system is probably closer to 9,000 than it is to nine, and we haven’t been to the most populous class of bodies at all—the ice-dwarf planets of the Kuiper belt. Even farther out, beyond the Kuiper belt, lies the Oort cloud, 1,000 times farther away. The Oort cloud consists of objects ejected from the region surrounding the giant planets during and after their formation. In the Oort cloud there may be large planets that were ejected from the solar system in the early days when Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were muscling out their rivals.

from: http://discovermagazine.com/2004/feb/discover-dialogue (top of page 2)

I remind the notion of Alan Sterns that the planets of the Solar system are rather 10 000, then 10. It is gentle gradation, of all these between 100 000 and 1 000 000 bodies - clumps in the Solar cloud, most are gravitationally dominated by the Sun, and smaller % are co-orbitals or just galactic host of near-sol planemos ( analogous to near-earth asteroids ), neither of them trully interstellar, because of the overlapping Hill spheres of the stars.

oort.jpg

If we take the figures of 100 000 AU ( almost 2 ly ) as a radius of the Sol's Hill cloud, and the number of 100 000 for the planemo list belonging as a Sol's share of the pan-galactic planemos population ( regardless of how and whether at all they are influenced by Sol's gravity compared with the strength of the galactic gravitational influence ), then:

the volume is roughly 1000.000.000.000.000 cubic AU divided on 100 000 = 10.000.000.000 cubic AU per planet
OR
average distance between these worlds ( if we grossly assume uniform distribution which is not the case ...

Models predict that the inner cloud should have tens or hundreds of times as many cometary nuclei as the outer halo

)

will be
over 2000 AU.

OR

two light weeks.

millions of planets separated light days to light months from eachother.

all powered by the lasing sun...

For transport between these worlds and between them and the innermost system the pan-solar lasers systems comes very handy.

Especially using the multi-reflection laser systems* capable of kilonewtons per kilowatt these worlds could be linked by what Birch called MOLONET ( momentum exchange loops network ), or very very high efficiency - including nearly 100% thermodynamically efficient regenerative braking at destination and to enjoy 1g brachistichronic travel**. THUS, the worlds in the laser network could trade energy and momentum too. The total system given intensive traffic would serve as massive storage of photonic energy, making it independent for months and years even in case of catastrophic failure of the central beamers at Sol. The beamers system also could be made massively decentralized and distributed***. The beaming stations at Sol, some if not all of them owned by the consumers, would have more then enough energy and firepower to defend themselves from attacks...

* - http://www.scribd.com/doc/24056182/Alex … and-Flight ; http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/02/photon … lsion.html

** - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brachistochrone_curve ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_trav … celeration

*** - http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/library/ … 4Crowe.pdf

Last edited by karov (2014-06-16 02:17:16)

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#7 2014-06-17 03:15:33

karov
Member
From: Bulgaria
Registered: 2004-06-03
Posts: 953

Re: Nomad planets & Laser stars

Terraformer wrote:

The laser wastes, a couple light years from the Proxima Dyson sphere?

Laser Wastes!!!   smile  smile  smile  smile

It seems I have not read it carefully enough !!!
I re-readed Chapter 13 of Karl Schroeder's "Lockstep" last night.

smile smile smile  ... -/- Hahaha -\- ...

The notion of a laser sun flickering on and off and into monochromatic phases like a 1970es-1980es night club / discoteque is very funny. ( Namely the redundancy - many times more numerous lasers per target shall in simple way avoid this or blackouts + even now we do have white light lasers ).

From the other hand the author states a planet each linear 1/10t of a light year ( presumably bigger Earth-like ones ) + several thousand such nomads beloging to the Laser Wastes subscription community.

---

BTW, Louis E. Strigari, Matteo Barnabe, Philip J. Marshall, Roger D. Blandford in their http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.2687 estimate

We estimate that there may be up to ~10^5 compact objects in the mass range 10^{-8} -10^{-2} solar mass per main sequence star that are unbound to a host star in the Galaxy.

The top of 10^{-2} = approx. 10 times the mass of Jupiter, or indeed the borderline between planemos and fusors ( 13 Jupiter masses for brown dwarfs ).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_mass

Earth is about 10 000 minimal planemo masses big.

The bottom of 10^{-8} solar masses is the mass of Pluto.

Which is DOZENS of times above the minimal planemo mass of about 10^{20} kg!

HENCE, the estimate of MILLIONS of planemos per fusor universally is exact.

Last edited by karov (2014-06-17 06:26:02)

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#8 2014-08-09 01:26:05

karov
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From: Bulgaria
Registered: 2004-06-03
Posts: 953

Re: Nomad planets & Laser stars

http://www.nasa.gov/content/orbiting-ra … -XL299qNvR

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=31277

http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/08/nasa-s … gfuture%29

pretty similar in aerial density to the "dusty plasma light sails" and the so MUCH insisted by me magnetically suspended super "Hall weather machines".

If we take into account the F Dyson's conclusions about R-value , i.e. mass of habitat vs. mass of optics, i.e. areal density of habitable surface vs. aerial density of light concentrator / diffusor, then with such "space rainbows" habitable / terraformable is each and every point of the Entire Universe.

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#9 2014-08-12 10:32:48

Void
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Registered: 2011-12-29
Posts: 7,836

Re: Nomad planets & Laser stars

So, could these things be used to provide a dense solar flux pointed at Venus, to swell it's atmosphere, and allow solar powered aircraft to extract it to orbit?  Mine the atmosphere of Venus.

A swollen atmosphere would put floating colonies further up in the gravity well of Venus, and also provide energy to to colonies to Freeze CO2, into boosters, and also heat them at a rate suitable to provide thrust.  I would also hope that Sulphuric Acid could be induced to break down, and recombine with other atmospheric chemicals to reduce and eliminate the acid nature of the environment.


End smile

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#10 2014-08-12 18:02:15

Tom Kalbfus
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Registered: 2006-08-16
Posts: 4,401

Re: Nomad planets & Laser stars

What if Planet X exists? Not as a gas giant, but a super-earth orbiting at perhaps 250 au from the sun with 10 earth masses?
http://www.newmars.com/forums/viewtopic … 35#p121635
Would shining a laser on this do much to make it more earthlike?
With a planet like this, we're stuck with whatever rotation rate it might happen to have, there is no reason to suppose this rotation would be particular slow however, and by varying the intensity of the laser over a 365 day period, we could have seasons. Probably gaseous hydrogen would make up a significant component of its atmosphere.

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#11 2014-08-13 14:47:03

karov
Member
From: Bulgaria
Registered: 2004-06-03
Posts: 953

Re: Nomad planets & Laser stars

Tom Kalbfus wrote:

What if Planet X exists? Not as a gas giant, but a super-earth orbiting at perhaps 250 au from the sun with 10 earth masses?
http://www.newmars.com/forums/viewtopic … 35#p121635
Would shining a laser on this do much to make it more earthlike?
With a planet like this, we're stuck with whatever rotation rate it might happen to have, there is no reason to suppose this rotation would be particular slow however, and by varying the intensity of the laser over a 365 day period, we could have seasons. Probably gaseous hydrogen would make up a significant component of its atmosphere.

Yeah, either solaser @the Sun's surface, or en situ @planet optic concentrator. Or both. Laser from the Sun to "planet X", could serve as bi-directional photonic tramway ( similar in function of "gravity train" ) providing 1gee brachystochronic travel to and from 250 AU ...

Rotation period unimportant because with second orbiting mirror ( say on polar orbit ) or via Hall Weather Machine, we could have such radiation pattern in space & time on surface as we see fit.

This http://www.transhuman.talktalk.net/iw/Geosync.htm , gives for 10 Earth masses and 0.3 Earth's density - 0.97 gees and 10 times Earth's surface area.

Such place could fit several thousand countries! Earth has approx. 200 independent countries and distinct territories ... with same ratio of land-to-water "X" might give room to ~2000 with the same distro of sizes... With optimal water-to-land which is less then 1:1 ~5000 with the several biggest = 10 times bigger then the Earth's biggest + countless micro-states.

In the whole Solar Planemo Cloud of 100 000-ish AU radius - entire BILLION of polities... several years away in the worst case.

Play with :: http://spacetravel.nathangeffen.webfact … travel.php  - constant acceleration travel calculator.

Even across 250 000 AU the longest journeys within the brachystochronic multi-reflexive photonic/laser "molonet" would be 5 static / 2 passenger years.
Close to light speed - routinely...

Last edited by karov (2014-08-14 15:59:47)

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#12 2015-03-08 10:02:31

karov
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From: Bulgaria
Registered: 2004-06-03
Posts: 953

Re: Nomad planets & Laser stars

w535

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