My mind immediately (before I’d read the article) went to the idea of coming across empty terraformed planets that a forerunner race had seeded with engineered microbes but never used.

That’s not in the piece. But a lot of great space applications of biotech are, including making fuel (as in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet).

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

Microbes in Space: Bioengineered Bugs Could Help Colonize New Planets https://suhub.co/2LDnDLM

I’ve had an idea for a while for a setting in which hollowed-out asteroids at the Lagrange points are “extensions” of terrestrial cities: High New York, High Hong Kong, High Tokyo…

Via Isaac Kuo.

Originally shared by Troy

I agree with Bezos. Nobody lives in Antarctica besides visiting scientists and workers. But at any one time, nearly a million people are in the air at any one time. So a million people in space is hardly a stretch of the imagination (though it still sounds crazy to say it). Nobody has to go to Mars and give birth to babies amidst radiation and dust storms and await the apocalypse on Earth, which may or may not come. If you’re going to live in space, it ought to be pleasant.

What is the MacGuffinite we could use to justify living out there? This is crazy now, but how about office space. A square metre of Hong Kong real estate costs $3 000 a year. Now, if you take the ISS, its operating costs are on the order of $2 million a year per square metre* of office space: $3 to $4 billion total.

If you drop launch costs to 1% of what they are now, let’s say you can have 600 people in an equivalently large station, giving you $20 000 a year office space.

Now the interesting thing is this. How expensive is your HK real estate in 30 years, when the big cheap rockets like New Armstrong and BFR are flying? $30 000 a year, assuming 8% growth.

Now, this is a very simplistic treatment, but imagine now that a space station is zoned as an extension of Singapore. Singapore has run out of space (no pun intended), and is busy trying to cram all its business and residential areas into a tiny island, building up and dredging to make additional land. How long before there are some operations that start becoming worthwhile? Tech and research comes first, but then as the station gets bigger, other business opportunities appear, more people are needed and the station gets bigger again – only without any limits to expansion. This is what Bezos has in mind. Mines aren’t settlements. Settlements arise from continual opportunities to make money, and also simply because they are there. People move there because they want to be there, and they will find some way to engage in economic activity in order to do so.

*1 cubic metres of pressurised volume to 2 square metres of floor space, because the floor and ceiling also provide work space

Via Robbie Yarber. Cheers mate.

https://www.geekwire.com/2016/jeff-bezos-space-colonies-oneill/

What could we do if we had all the genetic information about all macroscopic life on Earth?

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

The Epic Project to Record the DNA of All Life on Earth https://suhub.co/2xhOkCR

Delivery drones don’t have to be short-haul.

Originally shared by Judah Richardson

Volans-i’s drones are able to travel for up to 500 miles carrying 20 pounds of cargo at a time at a top speed of 200 miles per hour. (A delivery from Los Angeles to San Francisco would take three to four hours.) They are able to do this by employing fixed wings along with vertical-take-off-and-landing systems for flight, and both batteries and fuel for propulsion.

Because the Volans-i drones can take off or land on any flat 15-by-15 foot platform, the company and its customers don’t have to build any special infrastructure to make or take deliveries.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/26/volans-i-drones-can-haul-cargo-for-500-miles-and-land-on-a-moving-ship.html