Yep...to the dismay of the Nephlim rulers of Babylon...they didn't know what it was about us humans but they suspected their own doom if they didn't try and side track human mental evolution somehow...confound language√, confound history√, confound health and education√√...it all failed and "some" of us became conscious anyway...tong out flapping and spitting with thumbs in ears and fingers flailing.

The moon might hold some of the materials, yes. However, the moon has an added problem of the lack of any atmosphere. Mars has one, albeit very thin. But that atmosphere has huge (or am I supposed to say huge now?) implications for energy requirements.

It requires less energy to go to Mars than the moon - from Earth's surface. The critical difference is the lack of atmosphere. For mars it is just enough atmosphere to provide aerobraking - the act of letting the atmosphere slow you down. The moon, lacking any atmosphere for aerobraking, requires you bring enough fuel to counter the fuel expended to get there. All the delta-v you build up trying to get to the moon has to be countered by thrust provided by rockets you bring - and the fuel to do that. This is the recursive problem of rocketry - since you have to bring more fuel to slow down you need more mass meaning you need more fuel - you can see where this is going.

Now that isn't an infinite recursion but it is enough of one to make it a lot more expensive in terms of mass budget and hence energy requirements and thus cost. So every dollar spent on getting to the moon to build a moon base - and we are only talking about the act of getting there - is less productive and costlier than doing the same on Mars. The moon has other no-atmo problems which increase mass requirements such as shielding and far more drastic thermal variances to deal with, so from a cost perspective it doesn't work out. It only would if and only if there was some resource that could only be obtained from Luna. So far, we don't have anything fitting that bill.

To give you an idea of the numbers (from memory, so bear with me please), from LEO (Low Earth orbit) to the moon requires a delta-v of 6 kilometers per second - nearly a third of that is the landing. From that same orbit to Mars is 4.5 of which only .4 Km/s is for landing. That thin atmosphere makes an enormous contribution indeed!

The asteroid belt does indeed have an abundance of source materials. However, it has economic problems not unlike those of Luna. Indeed, any economically successful attempt at mining "the belt" will depend on Mars. Given that it is easier/cheaper to get to Earth's moon from the surface of Mars you might suspect it is true about the belt, say to Ceres. This is true. Now for this we really want to talk about the mass ratio - the ratio of propellant to cargo (including spacecraft) mass - because mining the belt is all about cargo.

For getting to Ceres, for example, from Earth you have a mass ratio of about 153. Higher numbers are worse. From Mars it is 11. So even to get the mining equipment there it is dramatically more expensive to ship from Earth. Next up are the atmosphere and gravity issues. Frankly, we don't know how to mine an asteroid. Our techniques and equipment all assumes gravity and atmosphere and rely on one or both of these to operate. Thus to mine asteroids means we need to develop that tech and knowledge. Even if we had the technology, a round trip mining mission for 1000 tonne dry cargo gives Mars a 50-fold advantage in propulsion costs alone.

Contrast that to Mars which has both atmo and gravity. Our techniques and technology directly apply to mining on Mars. From there we could cost-effectively send people and/or robots fro Mars to a nearby asteroid for developing that knowledge. Mars is close enough you could, depending on the asteroid, have reasonable latencies for tele-operation.

Every route to exploring, settling, or mining anywhere off-Earth in the solar system is routed through Mars unless you have unlimited funds and a radical anti-Mars stance. Mars is the way station to the stars for humanity. It is a bit like a halfway house for us. Just enough gravity and atmo to be familiar and useful, and located at just the right spot to build the rest of the solar system's infrastructure. It has relatively easy access to the belt, not to mention the entire planet and two nearby moons, from which it can build out even more infrastructure and economy.

Personally, given current technology, the way to go is to build up Mars, and then from that base (possibly w/raw unprocessed material from the belt) build a series of tether launchers to provide orbit-to-orbit infrastructure. Imagine a giant rotating tether where there is shook on one end and a large mass on the other.

For these, the transit craft is launched toward the hook, rendezvousing with it where it gets the delta-v boost needed to put it on a trajectory to the one that "catches" it at the destination (more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentu... ). These require far too much mass to be sent from Earth, and possibly from Mars. But they would reduce the cost of in-system transit enormously.

One last thing: We have the tech and materials to build a space elevator on Mars. We could possibly even build a "rotavator" - a tether that reaches down aspics up (or drops off) cargo from the surface of Mars, or the moon. But these all require significant raw mass. Thus, would be best built from Mars inward. Hell, if you haven't yet go check out that wikipedia link above. That is how, barring unforeseen massive leap in unknown technology, mankind will grow to the stars - and all from Mars.

In Quaid's famous words ... "Get yer ass to Mars" :D

Whatever happened to those "cold fusion" guys?

Exactly.

Just like homopolar motors (the only true DC motor). They only have one problem, current collectors (brushes). I recall saying this to my old boss. He had worked at Ford in the 1960s. He said they has developed an efficient, continuously variable transmission using homopolar motor-generator sets. The only problem with these, vastly superior to hydraulic transmissions was current collectors. It is now 2016, and the problem is still, current collectors.

An alternative is to build the solar power system on the Moon, manufactured from materials available there. Microwave antennas or lasers would direct the power to geostationary relay satellites that would beam the power to Earth.

I suspect space based power systems are more likely to be used to power other space based infrastructure. Once the issue of affordable energy storage is resolved, and solar, wind, and geothermal technologies become less expensive, terrestrial power sources will be less demanding than trying to capture Earth's power from space.

Of all the mysteries of the universe, consciousness is one of the greatest.

They should go for broke...all at once. Enough of this procrastination...perpetuating the process till retirement or the next generation.

If generating power is simple and safe, I agree it should be made at the place its used. But if the equipment is expensive and difficult to maintain (like current generators) and requires a lot of heavy fuel to be transported to each site, then its more efficient to deliver the power through wires from a central plant to end users.

+1 Like that idea...maybe they can be useful after all?

Each generation of toroidal magnetic confinement machines always seem to be just not quite large enough, so the scientists petition for more money for the next generation. They remind me of Maxwell Smart: "Missed it by that much."

The money pit of magnetic confinement has topped $100B. By comparison, inertial confinement devices have shown impressive results with less than one percent of that amount of funding. I strongly suspect that either laser implosion or inertial electrostatic confinement devices will reach break even before the massive, incredibly expensive magnetic confinement machines.

Maybe they could be converted to fuel rods (go Soylent Green)???

Of course...unless we find a way to rid humanity of critters like them...That should be our First priority.

That's rhetorically funny...

Maybe it was designed as a test...conscious beings seem to do well when tested, just out of a shear: "Oh Yea!...Watch Me.".

You do realize, once practical fusion has been discovered and everyone has a safe, viable, reactor in his home, the government will declare the fuel a "conflict material" and cut off the supply to the average citizen.
This, of course, will be AFTER they outlaw the disposal of any spent fuel that might be created.

I don't dispute your basic premise--that it is cheaper to mine, smelt, refine, pour, and roll the required metals, and bolt and/or weld them together in space, than to build the components on earth and lift them into space. I will also allow that, once you have your mine, smelter, rolling mill, and machine shop in space, you have spent your fixed costs. You then would need an orbiting construction camp to handle the final assembly, and probably another city--call it Areopolis, or simply New Pittsburgh--that would have mining and steelmaking as its primary industry.

But are you sure you need to locate your mine, smelter, and mills on Mars? The Moon might hold some of the needed materials. Failing that, meteoroids are made primarily of iron and nickel--key metals for raw materials.

yeah, fusion power is about two decades away. Twenty years from now it will only be twenty years away

Amazing what you can do when not worried about "cultural appropriation", eh? ;)

Power satellites are very feasible and quite safe from an energy standpoint - until you consider what it takes to build them on orbit. Solar sats beaming via microwave to terrestrial receiving stations requires a tremendous amount of mass to be place into geo-synchronous orbit. So, if that cost can be reduced, it can become cost-effective.

Unfortunately barring some unexpected and massive breakthrough in surface-to-orbit technology that reduces the cost to a tiny fraction of what it is now, those powersats won't be coming from Earth. It sounds strange, but for the cost of getting a few powersats into orbit from Earth you could bootstrap a manufacturing facility on Mars that would then continue to produce and ship powerboats to Earth-GEO cheaper.

As an aside as to why it is so much cheaper from Mars:
The energy it takes to go from the bottom of a gravity well is dominant. Thus the energy cost, which drives 99% of the cost of the trip, is far greater from Earth than from Mars. Once you've hit orbit you are "halfway to anywhere in the solar system" as we say. Thus the energy cost is dramatically less from Mars' surface than Earth's surface.

Because this is fundamental, anything that provides that energy cheaper, such as more efficient rockets, does not change the equation. The only tech that would make a difference in the cost differential would be an "instant-teleport" mechanism which bypasses the effect of gravity.

However, in addition to the transportation costs you'd need to factor in the considerable regulatory costs of such a massive manufacturing industry. Unless you could get the factories built in a country that had lax regulations and strong protections against "nationalization" those costs would be lower off-planet. Surprisingly, much of the infrastructure needed for rocketry is shareable with power-sats and not that complicated either.

Now as to transmission safety aspect, the area it would transmit to is generally designed to be fairly broad (kinda has to be to account for beam divergence), and thus the relative poor is really low regarding say a bird flying into it. They would not be useful as a weapon either due to the beam dispersion but a simple failsafe is one of "connected" rx/tx links with GPS targeting boundaries. The former means it is tied to a unique receiver station that must be within the beam for it to transmit. Think of it like a lock and key. The second is a safeguard against someone somehow moving the receiver.

You second.

Please read "looking for something else to be pesky about" more carefully.

My thinking is the same. Just look at how differently things effects one person as opposed to another. That investigation brought about the blood type approach by Dr. D'Adamo, eat right for your type.

I believe that given enough time, man can solve all the mysteries within mysteries, within mysteries of the universe. The amount of progress made within the last 100 years is astonishing. Yet, it is one one thousands of a blink of the eye in Universe time.

Is this some kind of a test? Perhaps.

You got that right. Just as many things in the past, we may have thought there are no problems but later, with knew knowledge and technology via means of investigation we find we screwed things up again.

They are very good copy cats...