One of my biggest curiosities ATM is how to source nitrogen to breathe. What are the rarest resources in terns of the solar wind and stellar evolution of a system? Nitrogen seems to get blown away with a very distant ice line that should largely determine its availability right? It doesn’t seem to form compounds with staying power on any smaller objects.
Another benefit of mining the atmosphere of Venus. While Venus has a much higher C02 to N2 ratio than Earth, it has SO MUCH atmosphere that it has 4 times as much nitrogen as Earth does.
There’s frozen nitrogen on Titan, and smaller amounts of it on the other moons of the giant planets. If you have the fuel and time to get out to the Kuiper belt, there’s probably 50 times more drifting around frozen out there, even before you start mining dwarf planets (sounds like your setting has plenty of time).
There’s also N2 available in the the planetary atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. A tiny amount, as a percentage of those atmospheres, but again, considerably more than is present on Earth in terms of mass available, if you can get at. Mining Jupiter’s atmosphere is an orders of magnitude more challenging problem than mining Venus’s. But if you CAN mine Jupiter’s atmosphere, you’ll have all the light elements you’ll ever need. We could build thousands of Earth surfaces worth of space habitats and have plenty of water and atmosphere to fill them up with.
Again, I think the best solution is Venus. You get carbon for megastructure hulls, water, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur. It’s all roiling around in a toxic vapor mix, yes, but it’s all very useful if you can distill it out, which is all known science and there’s just SO MUCH OF IT.
In other star systems, I’d look for similar solutions.
So the energy required to exit the gravity wells of planets is the main issue. I'm going with the assumption that infinite energy expansion is a fallacy. This is a post fusion era, but the expenditure of unrecoverable resources are a major *faux pas*. Culturally, they are free to utilize anything available, but expending the collectively held resources of a star system for anything short of an action in the best long term interests of said collective is unthinkable. This is a distant lesson from the *stone age of silicon* before Wild Earth and the migration to Cislune.
In my writing I’ve come up with the basic backstory of Sol, but my main focus is on a randomly picked colony around Alsafi.
It is helpful to imagine how the generation ships were equipped with the seeds needed to start a colony, like what kinds of ultra rare resources would be taken with them, and what would be a top priority upon arrival. One of three rep drones would likely slow around the outer stellar halo field to start operations and infrastructure required for resources beyond the elemental snow lines. The main question being resource density and fusion based propulsion.
Fusion is limited by enormous scale and the heat makes it a major challenge. The ultra exotic engineering materials required are considered atrocious because of the enormous amount of waste, heat, and how long even the recoverable byproducts take to incorporate into a sustainable elemental cycle. There is very little time pressure but there is extreme sustainability and conservative long term stability pressure.
I’m constraining the generation ships to 7 parsecs in travel distance due to pragmatic engineering constraints (baseless handwaving magic really, I’m just targeting the number of type G stars available, mostly because I find the lack of present lack of attention on the only type of system known to host life atrocious).
Many gen ships and colonies fail. The first geny ship to Alsafi is lost in transit. The second has a series of unfortunate events that delay the first cylinder construction. After ten generations the entire human population is sterile without gravity.
Indeed, time is not a major factor in most situations. Lifespans are on the order of a half millennium. I want to convey that our size and slice of time is okay to appreciate against a larger canvas and doing so is the only path to a greater future. The present is a primitive stone age and nowhere remotely close to some techno end game. In the present we have far too much hubris and a delusional grandeur that lacks a cultural perspective on our place in the future timeline. We are only a link in a chain.
The one constant in civilizations over time is increasing complexity and the tools needed to wield it. The interesting story is what becomes possible when that complexity is accessible. There is no magic in that story, techno or otherwise. The tools of that age are all around us right now, or at least the building blocks to make them. We simply lack an understanding. Harnessing the complete potential of biology and the way nature creates balance and stability is something we have only scratched the surface of observing, let alone harnessing.
The minutiae become interesting to me, like the logistics, complex social hierarchy after the primitive accruing of the fundamental means of survival, and the lives of average unremarkable persons with their perspective self awareness and nuances brought to light in a critique of the present. These need to be grounded in the conservative reality of an existence where the main differences between then and now are the expansion of accessible complexity and a massive growth in the available wealth.
I think we are likely already able to access and are using many niche materials and processes that the future will abandon as untenable. I see this as both an immense expansion of technology and a techno minimalism. Life is appreciated for exactly what it is. There is no guarantee.
Like, valuing the lives of a few astronauts going to the Moon at billions of dollars in redundancy is ludicrous. You will find many volunteers willing to take far greater risks for far less reward on Earth. These are a resource too and naïveté of this resource is stupidity. We are not a race of demigods like is common in present cultural religious thought. Life is precious, and no one will force another into increased risk, but no one has to force another when the full spectrum of people are considered. A suitable person or group will always volunteer to take on the risk.
So like, when I’m curious about nitrogen, I’m interested in how it might be sourced and moved around in the most stable and efficient way possible. There are likely large networks of transfer orbiting infrastructures and pod like bubble ecosystems made to process and transport resources. Biologically sequestering resources and the solid state of matter are the primary forms of storage. Like the mountains inside the habitat are the primary source of oxygen storage.
