Colony Ideas

Preface

The idea of terra-forming a planet, simply for a place to live, is expensive and outrageous.

When the explorers came to the Americas, they did not need to bring with them, any resources (or very few). There existed fresh air, water, and food in the form of wood, trees, land, plants, animals, minerals, etc.

Living off the earth means we certainly need these things, but there are far more efficient ways to accomplish this and far faster means than terra-forming (in the near future), especially since we will have to “seed” a colony with many of the plants and animals.

Introduction

It is my goal here to describe (in intricate detail) how a space colony can provide life for many. This is not only in scale by one colony, buy also by extrapolating this concept into many colonies of the same type.

The quality of life I foresee would far exceed the current quality of life on earth, and would give every individual the chance to excel in life and in social status.

Case Study: A one mile diameter toroid

This space habitat has an outer diameter of 5280 feet. This means a radius from the center to the edge of 2640 feet. If we assume that we shall only use the outer 10% of this toroid, that gives us 264 feet, or roughly 26 floors or stories by a distance of 3.14 miles long and about 264 feet wide. Calculating all the square footage gives us 4.3 million square feet on the lowest level and 3.9 million square feet on the highest level, with a total of about 108.1 million square feet . If we look at the population density of the District of Columbia, we see 9316 per square mile, and with our toroid having 3.878 square miles, this is close to 36,000 colonists, or about 3,000 square feet each.

Given that this previous set of numbers is for “city” living and therefore a bit tight, I'd say that 10,000 colonists is more reasonable, and leaves room for more agriculture and open spaces. There are other adjustments as well. If we are to grow trees and have open spaces, then we must lose some floorspace for the sake of 30 to 70 foot openings in areas for trees to grow and birds to fly. In fact, this could ultimately reduce floorspace by over 75%. If we make tree spaces 50 feet tall (using 5 stories worth) we can stack only 3 tall of these in our 264 feet. of course, we would not use all of our space in this manner, but perhaps a good part of it would be a mix of 50 foot spaces and 20 to 30 foot spaces. Growing grapes can happen in 10 feet or less but thats pretty tight for corn (including harvesting). All ground level fruits and vegetables can be grown in 10 foot segments, even if we include a foot of topsoil.

So far, we haven't even considered lakes or ponds, or the required “plumbing” for infrastructure (like water and sewage)

We may ultimately find that even 5,000 per toroid is too many. Given that one farmer can pretty easily tend 40 acres (1.742 million square feet) and the entire enclosure is only 108 million square feet maximum, thats at most 61 farmers, and thats low ceilings, not trees. Of course, farmers have families, so we might have an even 100 people then.

By this, we can see that the density of colonists varies greatly depending on “land” use.

None of this so far considers grazing land for animal meat either, and, as was said before, lakes and ponds and streams for fish, all of which is important for the symbiosis and O2 – CO2 cycle, as well as the nitrate – nitrite cycle (plant and animal wastes).

Toroid Social Aspects: Time Zones

One thing I found of immediate value in a rotating space station is the total elimination of “shift work” and yet have 24x7 coverage of the colony!

Let us first look at the situation on Earth in order to put my ideas into perspective: to have things monitored 24x7 on the Earth, you must have people on the job 24 hours a day. This is typically done in either 2 – 12 hour shifts, or 3 – 8 hour shifts. The difficulty here is that someone gets to work while the rest of those they live around are asleep. The REAL problem is that when they are trying to sleep, everyone else is awake: kids are yelling and screaming, lawns are being mowed, deliveries are made, etc. - I did shift work once, and the daytime distractions almost killed me.

My solution is the ultimate in elegance: Divide the space station into quarters, and each quarter is offset 6 hours in time. ALL people residing in a quarter, are on the same time zone reference. As such, all the workers, kids, lawn mowers, teachers, etc, are all on the same day schedule, for that quarter of the space colony. The section ahead and behind yours are offset 6 hours ahead and behind respectively. If you need to do maintenance in their quarter, then be aware of their local time and act accordingly. In this way, no one is working “graveyard” per se, and yet, colony needs are met.

Why 4 sets of 6 hour divisions rather than 3 sets of 8? Well, the standard working day is 8 hours, but with breakfast and morning and evening routines, this overlap makes much more sense, it adds an hour of overlap on each end of the shift, allowing for shift transition.

Also: the lighting in each quarter (AKA Quad) would reflect a local sunlight ( to help our circadian rhythms).

Note: I never worked out the global weekend structure, i.e. we all work all days, but that should be next.