SATSY on Nostr: Boundless Constellations The Emergence of Celestial Civilization Copyright ©1994 by ...

Boundless Constellations The Emergence of Celestial Civilization
Copyright ©1994 by Nick Szabo
Illustrations by Nancie Clark
In tsarist Russia, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky first calculated and articulated the Extropian dream of boundless expansion through the cosmos. In free space, his "mansion-conservatories", far grander than paltry cottages like Versailles, would not collapse under their own weight. Vast fluxes of solar energy streaming through space could be tapped by gossamer-thin parabolic reflectors. Elaborations on space colony designs since Tsiolkovsky include science fiction's wide variety of imaginative but often fanciful space stations, planetary colonies, and pioneer ships, Dandridge Cole's bubbled-asteroid colonies in the 1960's, and Gerard O'Neill's sleek manufactured suburbias in the 1970's.
But attempts to implement space habitats, even tiny dependent space stations, have crumbled into disarray. We've seen the continued failure of government agencies and their obsolete plans for space stations and planetary bases. Saturn rusts; the Shuttle and Energia production lines have been shut down. Out of the ashes of this failure springs a new vision, where the solar system is recognized to have potential for far more than mere re-creations of Earth, where central planning and narrow goals are replaced by a wide diversity of means and ends. Out of this vision will emerge a celestial civilization far greater than that for which any human can plan.
Constellations
The NASA approach, the Von Braun vision of
"next logical steps" for "the space program," is exemplified by the Shuttle and Space Station "Freedom" (SSF). These projects failed to meet their targets by a wide margin. The
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In the new approach, different functions are broken down into different constellations placed in the optimal orbit for each function: thus we have the GPS/Navstar constellation in
12-hour orbits, comsats in Clarke and Molniya orbits, etc. Secondly, a task is distributed
amonast several snereraft in a conctellation
of insect-sized robots equipped for telepresence. Our entire solar system will be saturated by instruments: cheap, legion, and everywhere. Virtual reality will be less expensive and more effective than space suit reality.
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