Charlie Stross Wrong About Space Colonization and Singularity

Charlie Stross has a 21st Century FAQ which tells people to forget about space colonization and the Singularity.

"99.999% of the human species who will never get off the planet are concerned. There’ll probably be a Mars expedition too. But barring fundamental biomedical breakthroughs, or physics/engineering breakthroughs that play hell with the laws of physics as currently understood, canned monkeys aren’t going to Jupiter any time soon, never mind colonizing the universe."

He talks about taking 2.5 years to get out to Jupiter. He talks about concerns about radiation exposure and other medical issues for long flights at near zero gravity. He talks about the difficulty in protecting people in space in small space craft

Orion Lets You Go Fast and Big

The abandoned technology that can be used is nuclear powered Orion. Orion configurations can deliver 1000Gs of acceleration. So then it is a matter of dialing back the performance to what the current capabilities that are available for handling acceleration.

Orion scales up to 8 million ton ships.

We know we can send people into interplanetary space for several days (Apollo). We could easily make the trip to Mars in days and then onto to Jupiter in days. We could bring supplies, radiation protection in cargo that is equivalent to several great pyramids or how many loaded aircraft carriers equivalents.

It will be too bad if we did not develop this capability until for some reason we had screwed up the Earth by not using workable technology because of irrational fears.

All it takes if for people to awaken to the fact that Orion can be safe or to develop a near-earth (moon or orbital) deployment or construction or to develop a political correct version of nuclear rocket (IEC fusion space propulsion).

Full article here:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/02/charlie-stross-wrong-about-space.html