At least some of your raw materials, you’re going to have to ship from Earth (the people themselves, if nothing else), and those shipping costs are almost certainly going to end up being far greater than everything else combined. You might be presupposing some indistinguishable-from-magic technology which makes that part negligibly cheap, but the problem then becomes that the existence of such a technology would drastically change the price of commodities like iron.
Really, the tech level involved could put us anywhere from “the entire economic output of Planet Earth for a century”, to “something that a bunch of bored teenagers would throw together in an afternoon”, and you’re not giving us any information about the tech level you’re interested in.
The tech level assumptions I am making include biogenetics (not relevant, I think), cybernetics (also not relevant), advanced AI and robotics, and space travel.
For space travel, the assumptions I make are a) about a fifty-year journey from Earth, so a minimum of import-export from Earth; b) some kind of stasis for the colonists en route; c) Earth begins by colonizing Luna, Mars and Europa before leaving the solar system, so they have experience in colonizing other worlds before; d) and the speed of their travel is probably no more than half of lightspeed — in other words, very advanced superscience, but not “Star Trek warp speed, get there in an afternoon” advanced.
I am assuming there are no matter-replicators, no teleporters, no matter-transmutation and no matter-duplication. My nod toward superscience is the force field.
The real question you need to answer is not how much steel you’re taking, but but how much construction equipment.
Because the answer is that you not shipping any raw materials 50 light years. All you can do is take the equipment to build the equipment you need. And that’s construction equipment, lots of machine tools, fabricators for wire and fiber, and so on.
For power, use whatever magic technology you’re using to power a space ship of that size to half light speed, which requires more power than everything on earth combined.
That’s one reason why these numbers aren’t out there to begin with. If you’ve got that kind of magic technology, creating a 2000-level earth city isn’t believable in the first place. You either start with a few seeds or a Star Trek-style matter duplicator. Everything in between has huge problems that are probably not overcomeable.
Precisely! And I want to know how much steel (and stuff) they will need to mine, buy, beg, borrow or steal to make a colony.
So far as I have been able to determine, the Burj Dubai tower will have 334,000 m[sup]2[/sup] of floor space and use 330,000 m[sup]3[/sup] of concrete and 39,000 tons of steel. I don’t have any reliable figures on how many people it’s meant to hold, but I can deduce some numbers from the floor space given. In any case, it boils down to 1 m[sup]3[/sup] of concrete and 0.3 tons of steel for every 1 m[sup]2[/sup] living space. Those numbers may not scale down perfectly to a single-family residence but for estimating urban development, it’s a start.
The Empire State Building has 2/3 the floor space, and it uses 113 km of pipe, and 760,000 m of wiring.
Of course I don’t think that any colony will plop down anywhere and start building ginormous skyscrapers. In any case, estimating from skyscrapers alone leaves out roads, factories, cars, furniture, clothing, and all that other stuff. I realize it’s an incomplete picture, but at least it’s a beginning.
Not sure if you want to do this much research, but Kim Stanley Robinson has an excellent trilogy that’s pretty much a guide on how to colonize a planet. The books are called Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars. Basically starts off with a small group from earth, then bigger and bigger groups get sent in until most of the planet is populated. Might not be exactly what you’re looking for since they are doing a lot of teraforming just to get mars habitable, but it’s got a lot of information on, say the different groups of scientists that come in, and what their role is in the colonization process. If your people are the among the first to settle on this planet, you might want to check this series out.
Sorry I don’t have any other factual information for you, but I’d be interested in seeing what numbers you come up with.
Actually, next to none. If by ‘biogenetics’ you mean advanced enough genetic engineering, then they can plant fast-growing trees that are structurally as strong as steel, and use their wood to construct buildings.
And no, it’s not another answer avoidance - I just simply wanted to point out that in scenario like yours you use whatever materials are available. You don’t need to mine steel, if you can make girders from graphite nanotubes. You don’t need concrete, if you can harvest nesting gel from local crab-spiders. We use steel and concrete in modern construction because it’s good and AVAILABLE. If it weren’t, we would be using any other materials - and indeed we used them in the course of history. Human ingenuity in adapting to their environment is one of our strongest skills.
Well, since this is an RPG, you don’t have to be too accurate.
Here’s what I’d do. First I’d take per capita consumption of various raw materials by the US.
Ah, but the US isn’t in a high investment phase of development is it?
No, but China is. Take China’s per capital consumption of steel, and combine it with a developed country’s food consumption, say. Or use China’s energy per unit of GDP and apply it to a developed country’s GDP.
But my point is, that any number you come up with, will be totally pulled out of ass. Because any numbers that show up in statistics that exists now are what they are because they apply to beginning of XXI century Earth with existing infrastructure, manpower, economy and available resources.
You wouldn’t build steel-and-concrete skyscrapers, if you had to create metallurgic industry from the scratch. Couple of robots making sun-dried bricks of mud and straw are cheaper and faster alternative, and people can live as comfortably in pueblo-like buildings as in skyscrapers.
Are we assuming no atmospheric modification? “An Earth-like world” is a set of very specific conditions, with an electromagnetic field, a very peculiar mix of gases, a set amount of gravity, spin and Chandler Wobble, one sun, one moon, away from the galactic core and presently not in a part of the galaxy with a lot of high impact debris.
Two or more moons and some liquid seas and you might be building your cities with sea walls or domes, and your villages on stilts. Low gravity and your colonists are taking calcium supplements to combat bone brittleness.
I also recommend reading Julian May’s the Many Coloured Land. A few hundred thousand colonists over a fifty year period use a time machine to go back to the Pliocene era. Its interesting to see what they each choose to take.
I should also mention I have just finished a book called The Cree Journals. Its a diary of a naval surgeon in the early 19th century. He is about for the establishment of Hong Kong, when the place was all tents, mud roads, malaria, and Happy Valley cemetery. He returns three years later and there are impressive stone buildings, including a barracks and a governors’ mansion.
So within 3 years on 19th century technology and the places is well established with solid constructions.
For your scenario, less than 200 years later I lived in Hong Kong for 4 years, and the stone buildings are mostly gone and replaced by steel and glass skyscrapers. The governor’s mansion is still there, with the only major modification being during Japanese occupation when the Japanese military commander installed a new tower. The Happy Valley cemetary is still there too.
Aren’t those, objectively speaking luxuries? Who cares if 50% of the population dies before they reach 30? We can always breed more. All you need is enough food and some space to spread around so a single virulent disease can’t wipe out everybody at once.
Practical engineering knowledge would be higher on my list than medicine.
I understand what you’re saying. But even having numbers for steel and concrete will be a good beginning point: how much steel and concrete is needed per capita to build a colony? From that, we can deduce the amount of Substitute X we would need in place of steel.
If 400 pounds of carbon fiber nanotubes can do the equivalent job of 1 ton of steel, I have some basis for making some back-of-the-envelope calculations.
Anyone trying to run more than a medieval society cares. The people involved in the venture most certainly care.
Knowledge and skills take a very long time to pass on and you don’t want your students dying on a regular basis before they get to use that knowledge. You also want some basic standard of living and a reasonable level of morale.
I would assume that Planetary Colonization, being prohibitively expensive in Time, Money and Resources, would exclude any willingness to subject said colonists to high rates of mortality and extreme living conditions other than those already inherent in the situation. A “Who cares if you die? We’ll just use your corpse for more fertilizer!” attitude is certain to be fatal to any colony administrators and put a rather severe damper on recruiting efforts for that colony. Long gone are the days where the 90% mortality rate of the Jamestown colony could be advertised as “plenty of opportunities for advancement”.
Fish, you sound like a person who would like Fire, Fusion, and Steel the Traveller design book. I don’t think it has exact answers to you questions, but you’d probably like it on general principals. I also recommend World Building by Stephen Gillett. Again, I don’t think there are specific answers in the book, only that you’d like it.
Moving on the the OPs question, I think you’re looking at it the wrong way. You’re approaching it from the top down (i.e. “How much material went into Brasillia?”). Try the bottom up approach (i.e. “How much material goes into a basic housing structure?”). There may be a more data points to come up with, but I think the data will be easier to find and the result will be more adaptable.
Not to complicate things, but yes, assuming that the colonists are a) human, and b) mortal.
In theory, although not in my particular scenario, you could colonize a world by sending a ship with a digital recording of the minds fo 150,000 colonists and a DNA sequencer capable of reconstituting them on site; once the host is complete, download the mind into it. If you die, kapow! The computer whips up a new clone for you. No fear of permanent mortality. The same could be said if the colonists were androids operated by remote control; the android bodies might die but the intelligence would be safe behind the scenes.
Of course, that defeats the purpose behind colonization: to make room on the home planet. Brain-taping and DNA cloning duplicates your population without exporting it.
But disregard all of the above. In my scenario, they are human and mortal, and therefore mortality is a consideration.
As far as a bottom-up economics go, HookerChemical, I have found that there is something called a Materials Take Off list (or something) that explains exactly how much material goes into house. That is to say, a grillion and one websites tell me, “Mr. Prospective Homeowner, the first thing you need is a Materials Take Off list,” but none yet give an example of a typical house. Still working on that.
I’m quoting myself here, but I should also point out that having some basic figures makes it possible to calculate energy>mass conversions also.
If it takes 4.4 yonks of energy to create 1 ton of steel, then I know can calculate many yonks the colony has at its disposal, and how long it will take to create the necessary steel.
In my scenario, they are human and mortal, and therefore mortality is a consideration.