Welcome to the Sunday Paper Club. (Almost) every Sunday, this blog will offer analysis of a paper on space habitation and other related topics. These are my opinions on a weekly scientific paper; basically I read the paper and write down my thoughts are I read it. They are subject to my perspectives and believes. I am open to debate, so if any reader believes I have misinterpreted something in a paper, please point it out. I'm only a student and I'm still learning how to read these papers and interpret them. All quotes and ideas are from the paper unless otherwise noted. All papers I review are available for free online.
This week we are reviewing Burning the Cosmic Commons: Evolutionary Strategies for Interstellar Colonization
This paper is a collection of mathematical models that can help plan a space habitation effort. It really feels like this paper is the base for a computer model predicting human’s expansion into space. The first interesting part of this paper is the reason it says space inhabitant will move out. Because of the risk involved, a space habitation effort will not be launched until its population growth rate hits zero. If this is true, this would explain why we don’t have a moon base yet. It makes sense because, according to the model, if a planet were to launch all the units it could into space, only one, on average would survive to inhabit another planet. With rates like this, a low quality per unit, high volume space habitation rush would be worse then a high quality per unit, low volume space habitation rush. This is because the amount of units sent to inhabit space does not effect the results of the mission, the the survivability of each units does.
What’s interesting is the mathematical model for survivability. It is a exponential function because for every unit of distance traveled in space, space inhabitants play Russian roulette with the cosmos.
Another interesting thing is that, as the generations go by, people slowly start not wanted to be at the frontier and start to increase the time before each space habitation rush. Also, as the generations go by, people tend to “fall further behind the leading edge and increase in [population].” But, each generation expects its space habitation rush to be bigger then the pervious one’s. This makes sense in our world because the next generation of space cadets are looking to out do Apollo. Also, the mortality rate of space colonizes goes down with each generation. On the economic side, space inhabitant “infinite patience regarding investments whose returns keep up with a” space habitation rush. So, if an investors ships keep up a the fleet, they will be happy.
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-Do you think this paper’s model is good?
