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Originally Posted by Skywyze
I agree that colonization is possible without these technologies, and in fact I think colonization is possible NOW. However, I believe you are underestimating the rate of technological advancement, which is proceeding at an exponential rate itself. A few centuries is a VERY long time for technological growth, just look at the last century...
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I hope I am – space elevators are beautiful technologies I’d love to live to see. I’m far from certain they will ever exist, though, as the engineering challenges they present are, to repeat myself
truly daunting.
Consider this scenario: Advanced semi-autonomous unmanned vehicles, launched using 20th century technology, arrive after the usual multi-year trip in the Jovian moon/ring system. There, some drop electricity-generating tethers onto the surfaces of suitable minor moons, using the power to extract silicates and metals to construct large solar-power panels, more vehicles, and special-purpose particle accelerator/collector/refrigerators. Others collect hydrogen and oxygen from the atmospheres of Jupiter and Europa for use in conventional rocket motors. After decades of mining and assembly, immense solar-powered particle accelerators are boosted out of Jovian orbit into long, low-energy transfer orbits, ending in solar orbits closer than that of Mercury. There, they generate and expend hundreds of thousands of times the current artificial electrical output of Earth to, at very low efficiency, create, cool, and store at near absolute zero hundreds of kilograms of anti-hydrogen. This anti-hydrogen is used to fuel human passenger capable spacecraft capable of sustained multi-g acceleration and repeated Earth landings and launches.
Once started, the industry-like process can expand, though not to unlimited size, to a great enough size that, after 50 to 75 years, transportation from Earth to other locations in the solar system is as available as 20th century air travel. Limiting acceleration to a human-comfortable 1 g, inner-planet destinations require 1-2 day flights, Jupiter 3-4 days, Neptune, the outermost great planet, 7-8, Pluto and other Kuiper objects 9+.
Here is a highly energy-inefficient technological system that completely opens the solar system to human colonization, yet requires no material unavailable in the 20th century. The great virtue of space elevators are their energy efficiency. In a technological system with abundant energy, elegant as they are, space-elevators might be as irrelevant as super-efficient light-emitting panels are in present day, modestly electric energy-rich, incandescent light-bulb-loving 1st world countries.
This is, or course, clearly just on of many speculative scenarios, no more necessarily likely than a low-energy, high-efficiency solar system-colonizing civilization with super-strong materials and space elevators. But it’s no less necessarily likely, either.
