Space Concepts
These are space development concepts, in other words, things that could be built in the future. They are original in that I thought of them, but people often have the same ideas independently of each other. Out of these, the relevance and impact is the highest for the flow dividers, and it's not close.
AI use
These are all my original concepts. The writing, mostly on Medium and Blogger, is kept 100% AI-free. However, I make a hard distinction for the GitHub repos that do numerical work for the ideas, where I use code assistants heavily.
Counter-intuitively, this explosion in machine numerical and equation ability has left my blogs with dramatically fewer equations and numbers, keeping it to only the most high-level results from what has now become AI work. Much of the code was written by me before code assistants were a thing, but the pace of numerical and simulation progress has increased dramatically because these are side projects. I do not have time to code all of that, but I do have time and energy to daydream, prompt, and process results.
Space Concepts
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🧅🛞 Flow Dividers for Artificial Gravity in Air
Kardashev range: 0.73-1.7
Velocity-partitioning flow dividers allows a rotating habitat to exist inside a larger breathable atmosphere without suffering catastrophic drag.
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🌐🧱 Passive Pressurization via Self-Gravity of Walls
Kardashev range: 1.3-2.4
12 km thick habitat walls can balance their own gravity against atmospheric pressure, originally from Dani Eder, I do a lot of equations.
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💎🌕 L1 Diamond Stabilizer
Kardashev range: 0.8-1.8
A diamond-shaped Earth-Moon L1 megastructure can stabilize itself without propellant by shifting mass internally and exploiting tidal quadrupole effects.
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🚀🐋 Atmospheric Scoop Divers
Kardashev range: 0.8-1.8
Deep hypersonic atmospheric scoop vehicles could harvest nitrogen from Earth's atmosphere and deliver them to off-world settlements. Also, probably Titan.
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☀️⌛ Stealth Craft in Space
Kardashev range: 1.0-2.5
Inverted-hourglass or long-tube optical geometries would be the bleeding edge of solar absorption reduction. This allows lower-temp skins with longer dwell times.
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🐘❄️ Petawatt Radiators and Beyond
Kardashev range: 1.2-3.5
Advanced civilizations would still have motive to concentrate in cities, and heat removal is the scaling limitation. Cycling metals through vacuum is the only choice for these powers. But how?
Secondary Concepts
These are related concepts I care about, but they are not necessarily original to me.
- Torus-world: Torus-world was my first love. Anders Sandberg's TorusEarth writeup did a better job than I did, although I had already started down that route. There still might be more to discover about them.
- Space runways: the Space Runway FAQ covers a space-elevator alternative. I have also written about it here. I think there may be low-mass full-velocity demos you could build near-term, but it still seems unlikely. Even so, it is still better than most of what you will find out there on the internet.
- Low-lunar-orbit catchers: I have written several times about lunar mass drivers, but I am more interested in the constraints that catching poses. Specifically, I am really into the idea of a low-lunar-orbit catcher, which can have extraordinarily low relative delta-v for the catch. These are unstable, and you need about 0.9 km/s to run away back to a frozen orbit. There are too many interlocking assumptions with other technologies, so I find it difficult to write about concretely. Still, it is a good secondary topic. I wrote some about that here, but it still needs detail on the retreat orbit, which is a likely near-term analysis of mine.
- Basalt fibers: I am weirdly interested in basalt fibers. The moon is critically deficient in many organic molecules, so this may be our best chance to make something soft-ish cheaply there. I do not have anything to contribute here, but I am into it.
- Project PACER in space: Back in the heyday of nuclear development, people seriously considered using nuclear explosions to generate electricity. Many still believe that this would have been more economical than other power sources, because nuclear bombs have extraordinarily favorable scaling laws. However, blast-chamber physics and governance issues put this in doubt. In space, these factors no longer apply in the same way. A spherical microgravity blast chamber is a mere matter of material procurement, and everything scales beautifully, consistently with R^3. Even with once-a-day shots, this could work, unleashing outrageous energy scaling. This needs more attention, but I do not have a whole lot to add other than “in space”, and the rest honestly writes itself. I wrote about that here.
Failed Ideas
I had these ideas, but they do not work. You've been warned.
- Tidally pumped barbell tether: The idea was to lengthen and shorten a barbell tether in correspondence with tidal quadrupole effects, which would then give you a momentum source from those tidal effects. That is qualitatively correct, but quantitatively wrong, because you need a tether almost the size of a space elevator before it starts to matter enough. This was the first time AI led me very deep down a dead end without me realizing it until I had already wasted a great deal of time.