Your three biggest future worries

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

There definitely should be concern for the situation around the Colorado river, but the urban areas have less concern compared to agriculture. If all agriculture shut down in the Colorado River drainage there would be enough water for urban uses. For a while, anyway.

Personally, I don’t want to end up in a senior care facility with my memories stripped away. I’d rather the cancer or some other physical ailment take me out before losing my mind, but I worry more generally I will outlive my usefulness and money and become a burden for loved ones.

Nationally, I think the state of affairs, politically, is our biggest risk. The tribalism and divisiveness going on now assures that any big threats that come along will hurt us more than it should. The pandemic was just a teaser of how bad it will get under a more severe menace.

Globally, I agree climate change is going to be the biggest problem and unless we start doing something collectively we’re going to have to adapt to the world in expensive and uncomfortable ways.

22

who would pay for the space cleaning service, and why? you are aware of what is scooting around is mostly random mini-to-micro junk and not exactly diamonds - akin of what you’d find on the berm of a highway

what would be the business model behind it?

not meant as snark, but I’d be interested in any thoughts

23

Yeah, and as I understand it, there is a vast amount of space between each little junk fragment, it would be virtually impossible to actually collect it with a maneuverable net. It’s not like some giant Saturn’s-ring of rock-sized trash waiting to be hauled up.

24

my take:

1.) the institutionalization of human stupidity … not trying to go off into politics, but the rowdy-trump-crowd / 6 jan. / gun-toting-militia / flatearthers / climatechange-deniers / anti-vaxxers becoming somewhat of an established segment (dont get me wrong, idiots always existed, but now they can gather and self-amplify within their bubble) - that get a SAY in real life.

2.) climate change, esp. the longer-term-aspect of it where we are still living happily, mashing the accelerator of our collective F-150s … while (in hindsight) we already fell off the climate-cliff. Just like the roadrunner still running in air before noticing there is nothing beneath him and falling down.

3.) unemployment in advanced age (55+) esp. in a scenario where nobody hires those people… I live in a country where there is little to no unemployment support - and there is a chance our family with teenage kids (solid middle-class in international terms, solid upper class in national terms) falls into poverty due to actions beyond my control.

25

Coyote. (somebody had to do it :slight_smile: ). But your point is very well taken and that’s an excellent simile.

All 3 of your worries are probably about right for many of us.

Ref your point #3, even those of us who think they have secure employment and/or secure retirement funds and sound government backed pensions don’t really know how much those things can survive the sustained onslaught of your first two points. The future can not only get weirder than we can imagine, it can also get suckier than we want to imagine.

26

Mostly reaction mass for ion drives, I would think. Larger pieces could probably be recycled for raw building materials, and maybe recycling things like batteries, electronics, and solar cells.

Even with the new technologies available, the cost to put a pound of mass into orbit is about $10,000. It seems to me that, at that price point, it’s worth at least looking into.

Larger items could be captured just like any other orbital rendezvous. And if you can figure out how to process some of the mass to use as reaction mass, it could become self-sustaining, so long as you use less mass to capture a new item than the item weighs.

There’s also the garbageman business model. Lots of orbits are getting cluttered with old satellites and other debris. How much will someone pay to declutter their assigned GEO slot? How much is reducing the risk of a catastrophic collision worth?

As for smaller types of junk, we could try some cheap, outside the box thinking. Not a net, but a thin sheet of material that’s as tough and stretchy as we can make it, but with a sticky surface. Send it on an orbit that skims through the densest clouds of tiny debris, and every pass it makes, more crap sticks to it. Then we either recycle the material, or just de-orbit it to get rid of the trash.

I mean, if Kessler syndrome is going to become a real thing, then how much would this service be worth? Well, how much is our current satellite infrastructure worth? Because if we can’t use space, all that will fall to ruin in a short while. No more communications, no more weather reports, no more spying, no nothing.

27

First Worry:
The insane branch of the Republican Party. Alt Facts. Anti-Science. Religious Fundamentalism. Authoritarianism. In 2016 the US kept control of the Senate by a hair, and in 2020 Biden squeezed into the White House.

Second Worry:
I fear that the days of efficient savings are over (mutual funds, ETF index funds, etc). I’ve loved watching our family’s savings double and triple due to compound interest. But, while I’m all for a falling world population (we’re burning through oil and minerals and crowding out millions of other species), I pity youngsters trying to support a burgeoning retired population. And I don’t think a shrinking population can sustain an ever-increasing economy – I’m encouraging my daughter to fund her IRA in her youth, but I’m afraid it might not stay ahead of inflation over the next 40 years.

Third worry, is general ecology stuff: global warming and water shortages.

Still I suspect we’ll muddle through for a few more thousand years.

28
  1. Death - I’m 75
  2. My wife’s death - she’s 76
  3. That my grandchildren or their grandchildren will see a world war over water, or, at the very least, armed factions in this country fighting over it.
29

ISTM you’re missing something fundamental about orbital mechanics. You don’t capture anything,

You expensively maneuver into the orbit a hunk o’ junk is already pursuing, then you can grab a hold of it. Now you and the target are connected and droning along in the same orbit together. But then to change orbit to get the next target, you need to accelerate not only your vehicle, but whatever mass you just captured.

As you rightly suggest, if you could use the mass from target #1 as fuel to power your drive to target #2, etc., you could make this a self-sustaining mission. But otherwise Tsiolkovsky will tear you apart as your bag of captured mass just keeps growing heavier and becoming more unwieldy.

The serious solution to debris is to find a light and cheap sort of mag tether you could attach to any hunk of debris. Which tether would be available in sizes for de-orbiting school bus-sized objects, basketball-sized objects, and 1/2" x 1" bolt-sized objects. Maneuver up to a target, attach a suitable de-orbit tether to it, then maneuver away to another target, attach a suitable de-orbit tether to that. Lather rinse repeat. Still vastly delta-V prohibitive today. But it solves the problem of what you do once you’ve rendezvoused with any given hunk-o-junk: you harness the Earth’s mag field to drag it into the atmosphere for comprehensive recycling as plasma & metal vapor in the high upper atmosphere.

Said another way, the real problem is that the collective debris field is very, very, very tenuous. It’s just that when useful objects are zipping through that tenuous field at tens of thousands of miles per hour, even a tenuous field represents a lot of impact potential per unit time.

Gathering up that tenuous field item by item is inherently difficult and energy intensive. IOW expensive. The re-use value of the debris won’t pay for it. Only the entities benefiting from clean(er) orbits will be able to pay, much less be willing to pay.

30

.

Wiki thinks the premises for your business model are off by a factor 12:

Launch vehicle estimated payload cost per kg

|Falcon Heavy|$1,400|

so, unless your can still reliably fish out 1kg of the exactly needed (size, material, purity) waste in short time , you are now competing with $700 dollars to the pound.

ahh… and make sure that titanium grade-5 nut that we need isn’t a hex-head but a pentalobe-s, as those do not work for us. … and make sure to have that nut certified to the (enclosed 12 pages of specs) as well as our client needs that as well

(sorry for the healthy dose of irony, but space travel doesn’t work lie a pile of compost …)

31

1- The fascist Republican Party. If either of the two front runners, DJT or DeSantis, gets in the White House democracy in the US will come to an end shortly thereafter. When the official policies of the US government are to reject science and reason, then the great American experiment will have ended in failure.

2- Overpopulation. Climate change and inadequate water supplies would have been greatly alleviated if we didn’t have too many people in the world. The planet can only comfortably support so many people yet we keep adding to the numbers and will start to lose both habitat with rising sea levels and the means to feed them as climate change runs wild.

3- Nuclear proliferation. Even guys like Kim Jong Un aren’t about to use nukes as doing so would be an act of suicide. But when (not if) terrorists begin to get their hands on them, then their use on a major population center becomes a certainty.

32

That I’ll never be able to retire. Too much debt most of it being our son’s student loans.
That I’ll get some debilitating disease that will make it impossible for me to keep working.
That my husband will get some debilitating disease (same as above).

33

I’m going to say

  1. The baleful future trajectory of the US Fascist party.

  2. The baleful future trajectory of the US Fascist party.

  3. The baleful future trajectory of the US Fascist party.

If my list doesn’t work out OK, all the rest of what ails the world won’t matter to where I am in the time I have left. Of course my list going badly pretty well precludes a good ending to whatever else is wrong on a global scale. We (the US) can’t fix that stuff unilaterally, but if we join forces with the other evil parts of the world to actively vandalize all attempts at solution, they darn sure won’t get fixed.

And if my list does work out OK, the rest of what concerns me as an individual are such small potatoes as to not be worth mentioning.

34
  1. Climate change / environment (too many overlaps to be separable for me)
  2. American & Western politics and its consequences for society
  3. Aging alone in 20–30 years