From: avatar (avatar@renegadeclothing.com.au)
Date: Thu Jan 09 2003 - 20:37:10 MST
Idle speculation:
I'm not sure what the original subject was, but aside from overt Dysonian
applications, I think the Oort cloud is significant because of it's size...
the
asteroid belt totals less than Earth diameter when globbed together, the
Kuiper Belt is about the Earth or slightly less also (excluding
Pluto/Charon,
including Varuna/Quaoar)... however the Oort cloud, with 6 trillion objects,
represents 40 Earth sized bodies when globbed up. Surely water, organics
(presumably including carbon) and some rock is useful? Maybe for societies
based on plastics more than metals? Nanotech once established could
presumably
be maintained in a biological/plastics matrix (e.g. also in dendrimer
polymers)
- molecular supercomputers should give enough computing power for
maintenance - perhaps non-quantum simulation experimentation techniques
might be slower without metals however...
Towards Ascension
Avatar Polymorph
----- Original Message -----
From: "Charles Hixson" <charleshixsn@earthlink.net>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Friday, January 10, 2003 4:42 AM
Subject: Re: ASTRONOMY: Dyson redux
> Christian Weisgerber wrote:
>
> >Robert J. Bradbury <bradbury@aeiveos.com> wrote:
> >
> >>for Kuiper belt objects. These aren't *really* useful from our
> >>persepctive since the are mostly water and CO2 (though the C may
> >>be useful).
> >>
> >>
> >Reaction mass.
> >
> >
> That's wasteful. You want C for carbohydrates. Use something besides
> CHON for your reaction mass (though H has it's rationale, being the most
> common element). Fe might be a good choice. It's easy to find, you can
> manipulate it easily with magnets. It ionizes well. etc. Pity it's so
> heavy, but that means that you don't need as high a terminal velocity to
> get the same reaction. (Use linear accelerators rather than mass
> drivers if you want any efficiency. Mass drivers are for delivering
> cargo. [The mass that's driven, and caught!])
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:35:51 MST