Episode: 1048 Title: HPR1048: Get off this Rock !!! Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1048/hpr1048.mp3 Transcribed: 2025-10-17 17:57:41 --- Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. It is once again Mr. Gadget bringing you episode one of Get Off This Rock. Okay, so I know it's been a while and this one particularly been real busy with various untundary things and we're enjoying the Hacker Public Radio episodes although the full schedule that happened right after the start of the year does seem to be dwindling down and there aren't many shows in the hopper besides the ones that are the regularly scheduled ones. So I encourage you once again as I will at the end of this episode to call in your own show and in fact call in and refute me and thanks something here about this although this is a different kind of a subject better and I don't know if anybody has ever talked on Hacker Public Radio about this particular subject and that is space. Yes, space, the final frontier and it's really interesting that Gene Rodbury put that into the opening line of Star Trek because at that particular time in the late 60s that was the primary driving force for technology and science of that decade. It was that space race during the Cold War and a lot of the technologies that you used today in fact the very technology that allows you to listen to me talking as if it was a giant radio station broadcasting across the entire world is a direct result of the space program but I'm not really going to talk about the benefits of the space program and the spin-off technologies although one can make certainly the argument that spin-off technologies have more than paid for the investment that happened with the space program. Now what I'm talking about is not just launching some guys to get to the moon and never going back again. I'm not even talking about having people on a space station and having our antiquated 1970s design and manufactured space shuttle finally retired and we don't have a way from the standpoint of the United States of America to even get people up to the space station to run experiments there. We're using the old police technology from the former USSR. Now what I'm talking about I'm not even talking about astronauts living in space. I'm talking about regular people moving off of the planet Earth and living out there. For the final frontier I'm talking about really moving off this rock and I will put it to you in the plaintiff's terms that I possibly can and that is if you want to guarantee that the human race survives and if you want to think about it that way and you want any of the other botanical any of the other floor and fauna that we take with us along the way and you want to guarantee that they survive the only way to do that is to move off of our single planet and go out there and care for other planets if that's what people want and live there colonize other planets like Mars being the easiest one but even the possibility of not even living on a planet but living in space stations if you will space colonies colonies are actually out there not in a gravity well and that is really the key component to this. The biggest problem with space travel there is somebody and I don't remember who it is up top of my head who said getting to orbit gets you halfway to anywhere. It's getting off of the rock that takes all the energy and all and most of the danger yes you can have failures like all 13 of systems that are going to maintain your life support and things like that but the major accidents that have occurred in space travel up until this point have usually involved the rockets that were involved and or failures of the reentry technology right that's where most of the failures have occurred. Now there are other methods of getting lost besides strapping yourself to a bomb which is basically what you're doing you're strapping yourself to a giant explosive device that just happens to have a hole in the bottom so that the explosion was a controlled explosion that goes straight in the opposite direction that you want to go and of course as Newton's law indicates every action has an equal yet opposite reaction and up you go. There are alternate technologies that we can totally talk about those but in this case what got me thinking about this is two particular items that have been recently in the news one is SpaceX that I kind of have had in mind calling in this episode for a while now but I was waiting for the successful launch of the SpaceX module and indeed SpaceX did have a successful one of their capsules it has already had a successful flyby of the space station and I have little doubt that it will have another successful flyby in the next day or so and have proven that their technology would allow them to launch a capsule, get it to the space station and even return that capsule back to Mother Earth here and their long term goal of course is commercializing this and being able to fulfill contracts that NASA has put forth for them to supply the space station and this is private enterprise actually going out into space. It takes a large amount of money because of the large amount of experience in designing the rockets to be able to actually accomplish this feat. They have a much larger multi-stage rocket I guess that a multi-stage device that would be it would actually allow for even more cargo capacity than the space shuttle that. The space shuttle itself did involve multiple stages and a thing to keep in mind here if you never really stated this kind of thing depending on what kind of physics classes you took or things like this. A large part of the launching of a shuttle of course was a giant fuel tank. The idea is not just that you have to have enough energy to raise whoever is in the space ship and the cargo that's going up but you also have to have enough energy to raise the fuel that is spent in the process of reaching orbit. And if you remember the shuttle not only had the two slide solid rocket booster which were of course the problem with the one launch that was the first tragic accident in the shuttle program with the O-rings of the solid rocket boosters but those solid rocket boosters would drop off but there was also a fuel tank that would ride up and then it would eject that. Now really ultimately what we want to get to here is not even having to have a multi-stage rocket. Ultimately the holy grail here is single staged orbit SSPO but we've got to go in baby steps. And I am a firm believer even though I didn't mention before there were substantial side benefits and technology spin-offs of the space program. I am a firm believer that the present action with NASA to get out of the rocket building to get out of rocket building themselves and to put out contracts for private industry to contract the moving of both the personnel and the supplies and the various cargo needed for the space station in the right way to go because we're going to develop private enterprise to be able to not only launch satellites but also maintain the space station and move beyond that actually move in to orbit and on to lunar colonies and Mars colonies et cetera et cetera et cetera. And as I say I'm not just talking about astronauts going there. I'm talking about regular people, doctors and dentists and people who know how to farm hydroponically right because it's space. But people who are welders and electricians and people who know how to run AC and all those kind of Lord help us all lawyers even right we'll need out there if we're going to truly move our society or whatever society forms out there if we're going to move out there it's not just going to be specialized scientists types. I mean we're going to need scientists and we're going to want scientists but we're also going to want miners. Now one of the things that got me in interested here was not only SpaceX and it's successful commercial launch of a capsule and moving towards fulfilling those contracts with NASA to actually supply the space station and eventually even get certified to be a launch vehicle for the scientists going up to the space station and returning those scientists but also planetary ventures which is it seems like it is so far out there that you can't even conceive of it but planetary ventures wants to spend multiple billions of dollars to actually mine asteroids. Now people don't know much about the asteroid belt unless they are particularly interested in the study of astronomy and the study of space but asteroids are wonderful things when it comes to resources. There's asteroids out there that if we move out to the asteroid belt then we would actually not only have a vast fortune in terms of resources that could be mined from that in terms of various types of metals and other types of minerals but there's actually frozen water out there that is part of the asteroid and so then we have water and wherever it is we have water like that we can also then process that to get oxygen to maintain the atmosphere that we need to breathe while we're living out there. It's a fascinating kind of subject and eventually I think there's going to be people mining asteroids and actually making claims just like the old days of the gold rushes or silver rushes and making claims on asteroids and mining those for profit and I'm not talking about big giant corporations I'm talking about prospecting families in their own little space ships. Okay and some of the asteroids are bigger and you tunnel into that and in the process of tunneling into it and binding out the useful minerals that are in that you leave the list of useful minerals but that becomes the basis of a actual livable habitat. I'm very familiar with this in Missouri. Right within less than a quarter mile of where I'm driving right this second is a limestone cave and there's lots and lots of limestone caves around the campus of the area and what happens with that is once the limestone gets mined out your left with this limestone cave which is perfect for business use if what you want is not some type of retail space or something that looks really gorgeous but what you need is some type of storage. It's perfect for storing things because it's always the same temperature and you don't have to have any air conditioning or any heating to maintain that temperature. It's very dry no matter what the humidity is outside. So it's perfect for storing documents for instance the company I work for built the data center in suburban Kansas City it's about a few miles south of where the Kansas City Royals and the Kansas City Chiefs play football and baseball. Right and it was built there specifically because there's a limestone cave underneath the building and that's where the document storage takes place after the documents have gone there and have didn't see a dip. And that was a specific request of the site that was a specific requirement of the site is have that document storage. All my cars also headquartered here in Kansas City is already printing the cards that you're going to buy from them some Christmas or birthday or Mother's Day or Father's Day or Valentine's Day sometime in 2013 or even 2014 and they're all being stored in limestone caves here in the Kansas City area because of the perfect place to store that type of thing. And it's not just paper there's lots of things that benefit from that. So this idea now very similar not exactly the same thing I know because we're not having to manufacture the atmosphere but one thing you do need to do with the limestone caves is have some fans if it's a deep enough cave and if it goes far enough back into the mountainside or the hillside where it's been dug you do need to have some fans that are kind of force feeding the atmosphere into that cave structure if you're going to have people back here there breathing and turning the oxygen into carbon dioxide right because eventually there would not be enough natural circulation of air and you have a chance of getting trapped into a carbon dioxide rich environment which is a very healthy for human beings. So you have to have to a certain extent a crude form of a environmental system to maintain people's good health when they are working in those environments. It's a similar kind of a situation here you could use the mind out larger asteroid and the very act of mining it is also creating the tunnels and creating the rooms that would eventually be living space for a large group of people. Now I know you think I'm just totally locked out here but I have read over and over again practical examples in really good science fiction of how this could work and how it could happen and I've even read some excellent short stories about the situations where people screw up you know when people make mistakes and unfortunately this is going to be a very inhospitable environment. If you make a mistake it could be the last mistake you ever make but then again people used to get come up the river the Mississippi River and take a left at St. Louis and come up here to Kansas City where they came down the Ohio then up the river and over from St. Louis and people used to come in grows back a little bit more than a century ago and then by wagons in a town called Independence of Missouri which I'm actually just driving into right this second okay and Independence of Missouri was on the river and the man who discovered the Oregon Trail and the California Trail came back to Independence that's where he was from and started leading people in wagons out west. The Santa Fe Trail started originally in St. Louis but eventually year after year kept on moving up river and up river as civilization moved up river and up river and finally it get left from here also also from Independence and the reason it loads from Independence is because just less of Independence and downtown Kansas City is where the river turns towards and when the river turns towards there no longer getting in again or further traveling on the river it's not going the direction you want to go so they get off they buy a wagon they buy supplies to live on and they would set forth for weeks sometimes months of travel across an inhospitable wilderness with literally nothing yet no one to help them if anything went wrong the only difference here is they didn't have to worry about the air they were breathing but you broke an axle you're probably dead unless you thought to have a spare axle as the supplies that you brought along but you also have to have the tools and the expertise to replace that axle. You broke a leg you're probably dead unless you happen to have medical felt to set that leg because your months travel it along and most of the time you did ride into it you walked and the wagon was carto and there was a seat for a couple of people people have done things that are very very dangerous in previous times in our history we've just kind of forgotten that even if you were rich enough to sail to get to California for the gold that was out there even if you were rich enough to buy a sailing ship ticket and go on a sailing ship to San Francisco you should sometimes try to find some footage I've seen footage of sailing vessels going around the Tiro del Fuego down there in South America your dang close to Antarctica there and it is not a pleasant trip and that was the easy trip on the water and people were taking their lives their own hands going on sailing vessels so it's not a question of people willing to take risks if there are rewards there is treasure to be had out there in the asteroid belt and don't just count the idea that a new piece of land to call their own a new country to call their own a new place to live where people are not interfering with them and they can make a life for themselves is also a huge huge pull for people to make this kind of a journey and out there on the campus lane down there in Oklahoma and all across the plains there are farms that have been there for over a hundred years that started with 20 acres of land and the mules and whatever supplies they can get there and they literally cut that grass out of the ground and built their house out of it because there was no wood to build a house and yet they're thriving communities today and they see the world because they dug the wells and they grow across that is what's feeding the world. So people will do this if you show them a way that is a reasonable better risks and their sufficient reward on the other side they're not spending all these billions of dollars to mine asteroids because they don't think that the asteroids are worth they know what resources are out there. I used to read a couple of books by Bayne publishing. If you like hard science fiction or if you're not sure you like hard science fiction but you'd like to try some, I recommend go to a bookstore, you'll find a bookstore, go to Amazon, look for anything that's published by Bayne. Jim Bayne has passed and is no longer with us but he has been publishing for years and years ever since the dark ages back in the late 60s, early 70s when I was going to college in the 70s. I started reading hard science fiction from Jim Bayne. He had a interesting venture that he tried there towards the end of the 1970s and even into the early 1980s and it was a magazine but it was actually published in a paper bet kind of a for bet. So picture it's a paper bet book like you buy a paper bet novel but instead of it being a novel or just a collection of short stories it was short stories as well as science articles and it was like it was a magazine but it was a slick magazine, it was more of a pulp magazine and it was cut and printed on the the size of paper like you would see of a normal paper bet book. I can't remember which one was which I believed the first set of these was new destinies and there was also another set of this that he did for several years and that was called far frontiers. I think maybe far frontiers was actually before new destinies but I can't, it's a little bit clouded in my memory. And I read about a lot of interesting things both in terms of practicality of how people would live if they were mining asteroids and the short stories that were involved as well as the science of how would you get there. As I mentioned before there are ways to get there that don't involve strapping a bomb to your chair and writing it up. One of them is what's commonly called actually in the slang kind of an unspaciaficionados is called the beanstalk. There's been a prize for this very technology. Geosynchronous satellite. Geosynchronous satellites first proposed by a science fiction author. All right, for C-Quart years and years ago. Geosynchronous satellites today is exactly the same point in the sky because they are actually circling the earth, right? They're in an orbit. It just happens to be that the orbit that they are in, because they're sufficiently high and at a perfect spot in terms of their orbit, that the satellite always seems to be at the same place of the sky because it's orbiting Earth at exactly the same speed that Earth rotates. Okay, so now take your Geosynchronous satellite. Now the Geosynchronous satellite is up there at that point and it doesn't take much of any energy to stay there. It takes a lot of energy to get it there. But it's not like the Geosynchronous satellite has somebody out there constantly running a rocket motor keeping it there. It doesn't have a rocket spinning it to keep it in orbit. It's at a point in orbit where it's at a stable orbit. You get it there and it stays there without outside, without outside energy by and large, okay? So that end of your beanstalk will stay there if you get it there. The other end is tethered down on the Earth's surface. And then all you have to do when you get this cable going from the ground up to the satellite and the satellites always staying at the same place of the sky, right? That end always stays there. So it's always straight up perpendicular from the ground, straight up into outer space. Maybe on lower orbit. We're talking way out there. Easily, once you get it there, the amount of energy it takes you to get anywhere else in the solar system is minor compared to the amount of energy it takes to get from where we are now on the surface to there. You're halfway to anywhere once you get in orbit. The only problem with this is we don't presently have materials to be able to build that cable. Because with present-day materials, even with carbon fiber, the center of that cable in order for that cable not to literally snap into the cause of the gravitation that's involved here, the gravity involved here, there's immense pressure at the middle of the cable. And in order to build that cable, even with carbon fiber, it would have to be a diameter of a cable that's just completely infeasible. I can't even remember what the exact figures were when we were talking steel cable. And even with carbon fiber, the cable would be so thick at the center that we literally don't have the capabilities of making that type of cable. We're talking about cables that start out at ground level somewhat like but probably even a little bit larger than the suspension cables that are used by the Golden Gate Bridge. If you've ever seen pictures or ever been to visit a large suspension bridge, we're talking about cables that are at least that big, but that's just a ground level and at the other end of the geo-synchronous orbit. But in the middle, it has to get way, way, way thicker than that for the whole cable to snap into. So we literally can't make it yet, but you make that and then you get it stretched out. You probably need to have a way of having it be at the center point and then let the cable unwind itself in both directions. But once you get it tethered on the ground and once you get it out there at geo-synchronous orbit, all you need is a way for things to grab onto the bottom and climb up the cable and climb back down again. Or you put on tracks and there are cars continuously going up and down and once you bake that investment and you have that beanstalk, you can get things to orbit and you can get things from orbit. For almost no cost at all compared to what it costs us now. The scarier and hell version of that is the beanstalk that isn't tethered at the ground and isn't fixed at the geo-synchronous orbit, but is rather spinning based upon the fact that that center point has to be so strong is the equilibrium between the gravitational points. If you have the exact right type of length of cable and it still has to be big giant thick there in the middle to handle the stresses involved, you can have a sky hook which is spinning. So you have the cable going out of the atmosphere and flinging things off or catching things and bringing it down into the atmosphere where something else can pick it up and fly it down to the ground. I call this a scarier hell, you know, it's pretty obvious here, you have this cable flying around through the atmosphere, supersonic feet, maybe not supersonic, but close to it. But you can sync up with it. It would be a little bit cheaper to build and it would be a little bit less thick at the center. I'm not sure that's the best option, but it's still an option and it would still be a lot cheaper once you build it than launching something from the surface and getting out of the gravity well. That's the biggest thing, getting out of the gravity well. So planetary ventures is a marvelous interest to me. I think it's really something to watch. It's going to take them a while and of course the other scary thing is how are they getting the, I think they're specifically talking about titanium. As one of the examples of the metals they can get from an asteroid and very few asteroids can provide us with more titanium than we have in the entire titanium supply that we know of on the planet Earth. But how do we get it here? I certainly don't want them flinging the asteroid here, okay? Because the whole point here of getting off this rock is eventually there's another rock that's going to hit us. And then we're done. Do you realize that there was an asteroid, I believe it was an asteroid, not a comet that came within a minuscule about in terms of the normal space, space is called space because it's so big, right? Okay, I mean that's life's fred to a space. In terms of astronomical units between the moon and the Earth and the Earth and other planets, this was a unbelievably close pass. If I remember correctly, it may have even come within the space and been closer to us than the moon. Okay, that close, but didn't hit. And believe you me, if you want to get scared, I don't need a nuke, right? The thing that I have against practically every alien have come from some other planet and are invading us. And they come down here in ships to actually take over. They don't have to come down in ships. They don't even have to launch a nuke at us and nuke us, okay? All they have to do is throw something that is big enough to hope, eat, come through the atmosphere, and land, and be the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. You would not believe how much kinetic energy is in a rock. The size of a Volkswagen Beetle blinded into the atmosphere, had landing from a sequence orbit. To give you an idea though, there have been movies about this. Two of them as major motion pictures. We're not just talking that stuff that you've seen in a deceit movie on, you know, a sci-fi channel. Okay? Armageddon. And what was the other one? Deep Impact, right? Other two, I think Deep Impact was actually a better movie. But both of them actually did detect smaller chunks, not the big asteroid they were trying to, you know, avoid, but just smaller chunks and the results. I think it was Armageddon where it hit somewhere, I think, probably it was up there on the mall, but I don't know my Paris skyline well enough. I think it was somewhere around there. And the entire Paris Metro area and miles beyond that, they just didn't detect it in the movie, is gone. Devastated. Just the pressure of the air blast coming out of that knocks over every building for miles. All it takes is one. You know, this is one of the big, you know, and popular theories about why there are no dinosaurs anymore. I think they found the crater down there in the Yucatan. Big crater comes, big boom. End of life as we know it. So we got to get off this rock. Now, I mentioned I read a lot of good things that gave me an idea of how this would work. How regular people would live if they're living in this kind of a world where they're going in the space, they're actually working in space. There's all kinds of other discussions that we can have, and we may have those in future episodes to get off this rock, about how you can have interaction between the earth and the lunar qualities, because it's close enough to do something via radio. And have people working cooperatively together. But one excellent source I would suggest to you, and let's begin, it's a Bane publication, is by an excellent author named Michael Flynn, that's L-Y-N-N. I'd actually recommend anything Michael has ever written. In fact, one of my favorite novels he wrote was something called In the Country of the Blind. It's that old thing. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. And it was a fascinating kind of detective story set in Colorado Springs area. But Colorado, Denver, places like that. He wrote a series of books, and the first book was called Firestar. And if you go out there and look on Amazon, or look at your favorite bookstore, the Firestar Saga. Firestar is the first one, and I don't remember. Loadstar is another one, but there's three books. It's a trilogy. And it's all about a situation where a thankfully wealthy young woman, who is an Ares, sees a comet streaking towards the Earth one evening, and realizes that what a close call that was. And actually has the word with all to put things into motion to get us off of this planet and out there outside of a symbol stripe destroying everything that we know. And the whole series of books is about that. It follows high schoolers who, you know, she puts them to play a series of programs in charter high schools to get them interested in this, to get them trained up on various skills that would be needed all the way through the three books to them going up in the young adults, and us actually creating a single stage to orbit, vehicle that we can use to move cargo, and how their lives would actually work, as I say, normal people, welders and electricians and things like that. Not just scientists, not just astronauts. And it's a good read, it's an excellent read. I have a lot of respect for Michael Flynn, not only as a writer, but he did one of the bravest things you can do in writing in terms of science fiction. He's not writing about some far-flung future, a hundred years from now, or several hundred years from now, or a thousandth of years from now, when human beings have gone out and formed a galactic empire or things like that. He wrote these books in the 1990s, and was talking about things that were going to happen in the year 2000, between 2000 and 2010. In fact, they referred to the 2000s of naughty ops, a much better name, I think, than anybody ever came up with for the 2000s. We're, thankfully, through those, and now we're in the teens, right? But that's a great thing to do. Not to predict the far future where we have technologies that we can't even conceive of. He wrote a book about technologies that build on exactly what we can conceive of, and that we can conceive of those technologies moving on into the kind of things he talked about. Excellent set of books. I highly recommend them to you if you have any interest in this particular subject matter. Now, before I leave you, and we conclude this first episode of Get Off This Rock, I'd like to ask a question. And that is, I mentioned that a lot of this kind of religious zeal, if you will, for space travel, space colonization, and just the whole aspect of space technology was because of reading things in the new destinies and in the other series of books that Jim Bain published, that really weren't books, there were more like magazines. And as I mentioned, they were a very interesting mixture of science fiction and science facts. I have never found since then such a good source of the mixture of science fiction or science facts, and particularly even before go the fiction part. I can find good science fiction. I've never found these kinds of things discussed in the similar vein in terms of the science facts side of things. So if you know of a publication that is happening actively today, that has science facts and maybe even some science fiction that's based upon those kinds of ideas that's been published, I would welcome you to give me some feedback and let me know what you would suggest that I go try to find. Because I just haven't found it. None of the science magazines have ever done it for me. I don't know what it is about it, but it was written in such a way that it wasn't for the everyday man, but it was for the non-scientists who at least understood science to the point to understand the articles, but was not written with a science, a person with a really super heavy science background or really super heavy science training as a reader. So they found a target readership that really, really resonated with me, and I'd like to find something similar and I just haven't found it anywhere. And of course you can send that type of thing to hpr at mrgadgets.com. That email would come to me and I would know it was from an hpr listener. Feel free to send me feedback on anything that I talk about here. And tell me I'm crazy, people can't live another space, what are you nuts? I mean I figure even if you were a person who is an average, number of green peas and beliefs that the ecological saving of this planet is of utmost importance, us getting off this rock plays directly into what you would want. And the question of the technology to move society out into space and beyond earth, we can reserve earth as a giant botanical part to preserve all of the other species without us even being here. How about that? One way or another, it's going to happen. And between you and me right now, we couldn't do what they didn't arm again. There's no way we could even accomplish what was in deep impact. We went to the moon and we said we were done. We didn't build the shuttles, but we didn't design anything farther on. The shuttle electronics in the original shuttle, I don't even know what to say about what the equivalent, okay, if it's not just your laptop, your laptop is way more powerful than the original shuttle electronics. Okay, I'm sure there were improvements to these over the years, but the original electronics of the shuttle, your phone, even if it's not a smart phone, your phone, if you have a digital picture frame, the digital picture frame of today has way more memory processing power than the entirety of the computing power that was on the original shuttle missions. Now that's just one part of the engineering and I'm sure that improved through the years. But that was very, very, very old technology and it was time to retire that technology. But what would we do? Create your forbid that some amateur astronomer, like you know, Frodo, the kid who grew up to play Frodo, was the kid who discovered the asteroid in deep impact. Create your forbid that somebody sees that asteroid and they figure out that it's coming to hit us. Because deep in my heart of hearts, we're all dead. I don't think we got any secret technology out there that nobody knows about that would allow us to even have the catches catch cam we're lucky to have survived results of those two movies. But we could and we can make it so it doesn't make any difference because everybody say it with me we need to get off this rock. Now without this, this is Mr. Gadgets saying be careful out there and hopefully you won't be too scared the next time you look up at the stars by now. You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio. We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday on Deathly Friday. Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HBR listener by yourself. If you ever consider recording a podcast, then visit our website to find out how easy it really is. 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