Author Topic: living among the centaurs (Read 1903 times)

jstrout · « **on:** 10/07/2016 05:13 pm »

I've just posted an essay about living among the centaurs, a population of minor planets out between Jupiter and Neptune. It turns out, this will probably be a major home for humanity one day.

http://highfrontier.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=174

This is the sort of thing that really gets me excited about space. And I bet it's what keeps Bezos going (he's probably restraining himself substantially when he talks about "millions" of people living in space, for the sake of not shocking the public).

Anyway, I thought it might be of interest to some here, so I hope nobody minds me pointing it out.

kevin-rf · « **Reply #1 on:** 10/07/2016 06:34 pm »

I was wondering if you where talking about rocks or rockets. Nice to see it is rocks

kevin-rf · « **Reply #2 on:** 10/07/2016 06:40 pm »

One small thing, my understanding of Centaurs is by the nature of the orbits, they are not long term stable. Meaning they will eventually crash into something, most likely Jupiter.

It would be something to take into consideration.

punder · « **Reply #3 on:** 10/07/2016 06:47 pm »

At which point hand-waving occurs, to the effect that, a civilization capable of sustaining millions of people in the centaurs would be able to control their orbits.

jstrout · « **Reply #4 on:** 10/07/2016 06:50 pm »

Well, yeah, but they're unstable on the order of tens of millions of years. And even then they're (probably) not going to crash into something; they're more likely going to get kicked inward or outward, or perhaps be captured as a Trojan of one of the gas giants.

I'm comfortable procrastinating on that.

punder · « **Reply #5 on:** 10/07/2016 06:59 pm »

Nice article, will have to check out the rest of your site.

Since you are talking about building habitats out of asteroid mass rather than locating habitats on asteroids, you sort of take the existing orbital parameters out of the equation anyway. Small station-keeping thrusters would suffice to keep things pleasant.

p.s. sent you a PM.