Comment by Dylan16807
20 days ago
We could send ten thousand workshop machines, a thousand huge forges and presses and reactors, and enough people to run them and all the farms and chemical vats they use those machines to build. Is that not enough manufacturing capability?
And that takes, what, a million of those "Starships?" To be plausible you have to be able to get it a lot smaller than that. If you can fit it into someone's hand the rocketry gets to be trivial.
I was thinking less than 2000. One each for the huge machines, a few hundred for the smaller machines, a hundred to few hundred full of people.
And you could cut those numbers 10x and still have a huge variety of manufacturing capabilities.
I don't see why we would need a near-magic factory box just to build a colony.
Manufacturing is hard, even for something “simple” like a pencil:
https://www.amazon.com/Pencil-History-Design-Circumstance/dp...
Those big machines have lots of little parts and if you have to wait three years to get a spare part that’s a big problem. (Never mind anything that Earth sends to a Mars colony is a gift because it is inconceivable that it would be profitable to bring anything back)
Anyone who starts sketching out what a space manufacturing complex looks like (e.g. Drexler, myself [1]) comes to the same conclusion Drexler did —- there is this diverse residue of difficult to manufacture small but complex things. The good news is that we have molecular assemblers, they built you, and now that people are decoding the “junk DNA” we are getting a handle on genetic regulation networks and will be able to make them much more productive and reliable.
[1] unpublished study on manufacturing sunshades on an asteroid which is rich in something which is more-or-less “coal”, out of a lack of imagination I assumed it was going to use a pyrolysis system like https://www.netl.doe.gov/research/Coal/energy-systems/gasifi... and I can tell you that sort of thing on Earth has almost as many things that can go wrong with it as a fast reactor
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