Good man Chang An Jun original work
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Recently, I saw a US media released the US market brand value list (mainly for American brands, domestic companies only Huawei and TikTok on the list), after reading the list, I suddenly found that Space X and Tesla are in the top ten at the same time, and Space X ranked fifth, before Tesla.
In fact, I have long wanted to do a more specific content about Musk and Space X, about Space X's business plan and corresponding strategic value (including the Starlink plan), about the company's relationship with NASA, about Musk's relationship with it, about its exciting application prospects, and so on.
I think we should know three things: First, why is it so important and urgent to explore space? Second, what is Space X? What can it solve? Third, what will Musk's ambitions, and the change to the world, be?
Let's start with the first thing – why is it so important to explore space?
To figure this out, it's really about figuring out the following questions:
First, with the current level of science and technology, will the population of the earth exceed 10 billion?
Second, a hundred years from now, can humans settle in space?
Third, the sea and land are the foundation of human existence, so why explore space now?
Fourth, can exploring space really make the world a better place?
Let's talk about the first two questions today.
The first question: With the current level of technology, will the population of the earth exceed 10 billion?
It can be seen from the world population growth curve that after the Industrial Revolution, the world population growth rate has greatly accelerated, and since the second world war, the world population growth rate has accelerated significantly. There are two main influencing factors synchronized with this curve: the first is the change in the social environment, and the second is the change in the level of science and technology.
In simple terms, there are two main factors affecting the size of the population: the first is the level of science and technology; the second is the competition for various types of resources, including war.
The former increases the size of the population by greatly releasing and promoting productivity. For example, in ancient times, you planted a hundred acres of land alone, natural disasters are easy to fail, the planting technology is backward, resulting in a very low yield per mu, a good year you can feed thirty people, a bad year may be difficult for a family to feed, and the whole country can cultivate a very limited amount of land. However, the improvement of the level of science and technology can make the yield of mu rapidly increase, the ability to resist natural disasters be rapidly improved, and even if you can plant a thousand mu of land alone, the cultivatable area of the whole country can also be improved, and the number of people who can feed can be multiplied. At this time, after the sense of survival crisis declines, the population size is easy to increase.
The latter, through the competition for various types of resources, will greatly limit the increase in population size. Then the above example, with the improvement of the level of science and technology, the size of the population of the country increased rapidly, and then the development of the level of science and technology slowed down, the economic level slowed down synchronously, but the population development has its own inertia, at this time, the lack of resources will push the whole country from the bottom logic to "open source and throttling", the so-called open source, is to use including the launch of war and other ways to compete for external resources, the so-called throttling, is to control population growth. Historically, open source throttling often occurs simultaneously, because resource competition is often accompanied by war, and war can be said to be the most efficient way to open source throttling in essence.
If you can deeply understand the complex relationship between the two, you will find that this is an almost insoluble problem - the improvement of science and technology has promoted the growth of population size, the growth of population size has accelerated the consumption of resources, and the various shortages caused by resource consumption have spawned wars...
By the way, the end of World War II was not due to a sharp decline in population, resources and population size to reach a balance again, but because the improvement of science and technology has made more resources available to human beings, and thus increased the upper limit of population size development.
But in any case, once the development of science and technology slows down, or once the population size rises to a threshold again, then the same strange circle will appear again, and its establishment is based on the fact that the total amount of available resources corresponding to each level of science and technology is fixed, and the higher the level of science and technology, the faster the rate of resource consumption, the faster the total amount of available resources is reduced, then who has more resources, theoretically has a better chance of survival, and a longer survival time.
So can this strange circle be broken?
Of course, the method is also very simple, to improve the level of science and technology, and to add new available resources on the basis of the total amount of existing available resources.
But it's hard, it's hard, it's hard.
For example, the current energy crisis has broken out, that is because the existing energy technology level is still stuck in the electrical age, and the available resources corresponding to this technical level can no longer fully support the consumption of 8 billion human bodies.
When the electric age was just beginning, China was still in the qing dynasty, most of the earth was under the rule of the feudal era or even more ancient social structure, when the global population size was about 2 billion (1860s), and with the improvement of science and technology, the development of energy technology focused on the use of more large-scale available energy, so after a century and a half, the current human society mainly uses energy is still non-renewable fossil energy, but the current population is 8 billion, Its consumption of available resources is growing rapidly, but there are no new available resources.
At present, although there are various new energy sources for wind, photovoltaic and hydropower, as well as nuclear power that really has the prospect of large-scale application, they still cannot replace traditional energy sources.
If the level of energy technology cannot be broken for a long time, then the competition for resources will inevitably occur, the growth of population size will inevitably be interrupted, and even the population size will even regress because of the emergence of more powerful weapons.
In my opinion, the global trade framework after World War II changed the way resources were competed for in the past, and mankind changed from martial arts to civil fighting, thus giving birth to a valuable environment for peaceful development. However, the main reason for being able to maintain this situation is that the improvement of the level of science and technology after World War II has greatly alleviated the resource anxiety of various countries, and the advent of the information age has also shifted this anxiety from a certain extent.
But now, with the rapid increase in the size of the population, the development of energy technologies, including various other technologies, has not been able to solve the problem that "available resources are being consumed more and more quickly".
So I think the size of the population (7.89 billion) at the current level of technology has approached the upper limit, or even exceeded the upper limit.
The only way for the development of science and technology is to solve this kind of problem that is related to the crisis of survival.
Among the existing alternative paths, nuclear power is theoretically the best revolutionary energy source to replace fossil energy, or the controlled nuclear fusion with "light atoms" (hydrogen helium isotopes) as the main nuclear fuel, which will open the next energy era and solve the problem of population size growth limited by the level of science and technology and the total amount of available resources to the greatest extent.
But it cannot be completely solved, because the growth of population size is not limited by the energy ceiling, so where is the complete solution?
In space.
Second question: In 100 years, can humans settle in space?
Among other things, if you want to achieve the possibility of small-scale settlement in space (such as 1,000 people settling on the moon), then at least two things need to be achieved (the second point is particularly important):
First, controlled nuclear fusion technology is fully realized and applied on a large scale; second, there are no real estate developers in space.
Haha, just kidding, in fact, the key lies in the breakthrough of energy technology.
In 1964, the astronomer Nikolai Kaldashev proposed a classification system for technological civilizations, which simply means that according to the level of development and utilization of available energy by civilizations, civilizations that have reached different levels are divided into three types, and later people will develop it into five levels. The lowest level of Type I civilizations in this class require energy technology to be able to fully utilize the full energy of their planet, and even the energy from the sun on a large scale. But we still can't reach this level, so in the new hierarchical division that follows, Earth civilization is classified by scientists as a Type 0 civilization.
To break through the barrier between 0 and 1, controlled nuclear fusion can be said to be the most ideal path in the current theory.
Controlled nuclear fusion I can only say a rough idea here, interested friends can search for specific details on their own (those who are not interested can skip this small paragraph).
In theory, there are four clear controlled nuclear fusion routes, namely DD reaction (A), D-He3 reaction (B), DT reaction (C) and He3 reaction (D), which we use ABCD to refer to it. As for D, T, and He3 in the reactants, they are isotopes of hydrogen helium, respectively.
In terms of implementation difficulty, D is greater than B is greater than A is greater than C. Even the most easily realized C reaction, the ignition temperature is more than 100 million degrees, and the production cost of one of its nuclear fuels, tritium, is very high, the disposal cost of the reaction product is relatively high, and the maintenance cost of the entire reaction is also very high.
In other words, it's easiest to achieve, but it's probably the worst economics and the environmental costs are likely to be the biggest.
After the bad news, let's talk about the good news, although the C reaction has such flaws, if it can be realized, its economic benefits will be much better than the current fossil energy, how good is it? 1 kilogram of fusion fuel releases roughly equivalent to 8,000 tons of gasoline.
Within 100 years, large-scale applications of controlled nuclear fusion may have to hope for this reaction.
And the most economical reaction is the A reaction, because deuterium can be extracted from seawater, the reserves on Earth are about 40 trillion tons, and with the current annual energy consumption, this reserve can support human use for more than 100 million years... In other words, it is basically equivalent to permanent energy.
The theoretical ignition temperature of this reaction is 600 million degrees, which is only a reaction, and to reach the level of commercialization, the problems to be overcome here are far beyond our imagination, so although it is very tempting, it is still impossible to achieve in 100 years.
B and D are more ideal fusion reactions, the reaction products basically do not have radiation, the release of energy is also large, although the earth's helium 3 reserves are small, but the moon is close at hand has an abundance of helium3, the solar system Saturn, Jupiter also has amazing reserves.
But these two reactions may be possible in the more distant future, and are likely to be an important prerequisite for interstellar travel.
Of course, this is not absolute, but in short, it shows two things: first, controlled nuclear fusion provides key support for breaking through the shackles of human resources; second, nuclear fusion-related resources will be very important, including Deuterium on Earth and helium3 distributed on other planets.
Schematic of the barrel effect
So where is the connection between the initial realization of controlled nuclear fusion and the settlement of space?
This brings us back to the end of the previous subsection, why do we say that the energy revolution does not completely solve the problem that "population growth will still have bottlenecks"?
It is mainly a matter of time scale and resource shortage.
If the large-scale application of controlled nuclear fusion becomes possible in 100 years, the improvement of the level of science and technology will inevitably bring about another leap in population size, which may last for hundreds of years, but the problem is that there are many influencing factors of population size, energy is only one of them, it is most likely to become a "short board" in a long time, but controllable nuclear fusion makes it a longboard, then correspondingly, other available resources are likely to become short boards, such as metal resources, water resources and so on.
Hundreds of years later, although our energy is very rich, water resources can not meet the needs of tens of billions of people, metal resources can not meet the needs of building a large number of space vehicles, the same will encounter the "population size dilemma", and there may be new resource wars.
So what to do?
We can only develop into space and obtain resources from outside the earth, which is the ultimate logic of unrestricted population size.
Controlled nuclear fusion will be the starting point for us to achieve the small goal of space settlement.
Our greatest fortune is to know the existence of this starting point; and our greatest misfortune lies in the inaccessibility of this starting point.
But you can't, it's the way to go.
Now that people know how difficult it is to achieve controlled nuclear fusion, is it not necessary to wait for this technology to appear before exploring deep space? What does current space mean for specific countries?
This is what we will talk about in the next article, why we should vigorously develop aerospace science and technology now to explore space.
Write at the end
There was once an Internet buzzword that I remember most deeply: our journey is a sea of stars.
2022 is about to go through its fourth month, and in less than half a year, we have watched the outbreak and continuation of a war, an energy crisis, a climate crisis, the spread of the epidemic, an economic recession...
If we look at it on a longer time scale, mankind has created unprecedented brilliant scientific and technological progress in the past five hundred years, but at the same time it has also created an unprecedented rate of resource consumption, and at the same time, accompanied by the slow development of science and technology, the confrontation and hostility with the natural civilization of human society, let us always walk on the huge and long road of internal friction.
However, the available resources on the earth will not increase, but will be consumed faster and faster, so the resource crisis will inevitably become more and more serious from a large time scale, and eventually threaten the survival of mankind.
So a long time ago and a long time later, there have been and will still be many people looking into the sky.
I also think that when the nations of Earth become a big cage dilemma, the only hope is in space.
See you next.