| Varyon |
08-14-2022 08:00 AM |
Re: [Spaceships] Million Merchant Marathon
Quote:
Originally Posted by scc
(Post 2447218)
EU and British Commonwealth, who are the primary backers behind this, seem to de a bit better. And one of the reasons this project got started was America imploding, so the American tendency to overspend is gone.
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A world that has experienced the collapse of its #1 economy (making up over 20% of the world economy) probably isn't in any position to fund terraforming operations. Also, "a bit better at avoiding government overspending than the United States," even if true, still leaves a lot of room for government overspending (and I believe the EU tends to have economic issues of its own; combined with human nature being what it is, I highly doubt the terraforming spending is anything close to efficient).
Quote:
Originally Posted by scc
(Post 2447218)
Well world production of aluminum foil is only 6 million tons, so that would take even longer to spin up then plastic.
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The advantage of using things other than plastic is that you can fairly-readily get the materials from asteroids out in the Belt; set up mining and refining operations out there, and it probably won't take terribly long for production out in the Belt to massively outstrip production planetside.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Agemegos
(Post 2447234)
Standard thickness for what? The density of aluminium is 2 700 kg per cubic metre, so foil that massed 4.5 kg per square metre would be 1.67 mm thick. That's chonk foil.
I weighed a roll of aluminium foil in my kitchen. Net of the box and the cardboard core it's rolled up on, a 30 m by 30 cm roll (9 square metres) massed 343 g. That is 0.038 kg per square metre. 38 tonnes per square kilometre.
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I don't recall where I got the value from; I believe I googled the thickness of typical aluminum foil, then found a page that let you input the thickness of an aluminum sheet (meant to be used for aluminum sheet metal, but it didn't limit how thin you could input), and put that thickness there. I'd imagine I must have made an error at some point. Going off 0.038 kg per square meter rather than 4.5 kg per square meter, I'm getting around 4.3 Pg - still massive, at around 85 Great Walls, but not quite as ridiculous.
Fake EDIT: Retracing my steps, I found my error - Google told me that standard aluminum foil is around 0.63 mils thick, and then when I converted that to mm I accidentally input 63 mils (probably 063 - I failed to include the period), and so ended up with something 100x as thick. |