A comment on Transterrestrial Musings suggested I might be against space development. A quick browse through my earlier blog-posts would quickly correct such a misapprehension. What I was arguing was the race to bust up planets to make cybernetic “Islands of the Lotus-Eaters” might be as much a trap and a dead-end as the Luddite
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A worthwhile predecessor to my present musings is the 1996 efforts by Kelly Starks & the gang at the Lunar Institute of Technology. As you’ll note the “updates” have lagged somewhat, but the Starship Design Study is well worth a look. They went into a lot of detail and their discussion of drive technology, life-support,
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George Dvorsky recently blogged on the easy way to boot-strap civilisation into Kardashev Type II status. For those new to the Kardashev Civilisation levels, Type I uses the energy received by its planet – humans use and control about 0.01% of that presently. Type II uses and controls the energy output equivalent to its star’s
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The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has reported, after studying nearby red-dwarfs, that ~40% (range 28%-95%) have Super-Earth planets in their habitable zones, which is quite remarkable considering how small a red-dwarf’s habitable zone is (from 0.25 AU and smaller.) That means 80% of the stars in our Galaxy – at least our bit of it
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