Whether big or small. We all have that one thing from Scifi we wished were real. I’d love to see a cool underground city with like a SkyDome or a space hotel for instance.

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    9 days ago

    I’m confident that we could set up permanent human habitation on the Moon or on Mars with our current level of technology, and that’s featured pretty prominently in sci-fi.

    I don’t know if it would actually provide a cost-effective return, but I do think that it’d be interesting to see happen in my lifetime.

    • DagwoodIII@piefed.social
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      9 days ago

      Why think small?

      The asteroids are just sitting there.

      We could move all of Earth’s heavy industries off planet.

      • Mitchie151@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        We could definitely move into industry in space, but a lot of technology still needs to be developed. I think we now have the capacity to launch factories in pieces into space, but asteroid mining remains a technical challenge due as we now know that many asteroids are not so compacted. Furthermore, refining the raw materials in space can’t really be done right now, we probably could figure it out, but parts of the production chain do depend on gravity so we’d need to figure out artificial gravity on a rotating station or do some more direct kind of centrifugal refining. All hurdles we could probably cross. Then comes the question of what you drop back down from space and how you do it. Current heat shield technologies are generally poorly reusable, and even if we were we’d have to be flying the reentry devices back into space. Unless we create a cheap means to protect something from reentry that can be manufactured in space as a disposable, most goods would never be returned to earth. Unless we just refine giant cubes of rare metals and drop them into the ocean to be collected. I think most things made in space would be limited to serving those in space, or in lower gravity locations such as the moon or other asteroid bases. I would love to work on these challenges but there’s very few companies working on these challenges outside of a couple of asteroid capture startups that seem to have no further vision.