Storage of mining waste materials

Edit 9/24/15 The better title for this article should have been "Asteroids, the Buffalo of the Final Frontier" (seriously I need to stop with this amateur hour malarkey)
This post is more long term oriented in the overall intent, but it is something we as a society should try to plan for now, better to have basic guidelines now than hope that deep space mining interests will plan for the truly long term.
One of the big risks to astronauts and satellites alike is loose orbital debris whipping around the Earth, causing potential disasters (although not on the same scale as what you may have seen in the movie Gravity.
Currently we have no idea what the waste material from asteroid mining will look like, namely because we don't even have a clear idea on how will extract those resources, as a consequence I will be incredibly vague (shocking I know) as to what said debris will look like, that being said, it is unlikely that the mining process will not create some type of rubble.  Under normal circumstances, the waste material is unlikely to start wandering around the solar system and causing chaos, that being said, in the unlikely event that a mined out asteroid does have a collision with another body or there is some kind of explosion on the mining platform, the cloud of detritus has the potential to cause a laundry list of issues for future space exploration.
Instead of allowing waste materials to be loosely floating around their parent celestial body, mining interests should be required to have a future plan for what to do with their waste mass before mining is allowed to begin.  Depending on the chemical make up of the mining site as well as the type of body being harvested different options will make sense.

One option is to melt waste metallic compounds or glass precursors and use them to bind waste materials into a much larger mass of slagged material.  After the larger mass is created it could be maneuvered via solar sail, laser ablative engine, ion engine, etc.. to a central waste mass reservoir where the waste mass could be refined at a later date when those substances are worth mining separately.  Another potential option is to collaborate with mining and space exploration interests in  the creation of a refining technology that is intended to provide maximum added value for readily available mineral deposits found through out the solar system.

More likely miners would be asked to fill any mining holes with waste material after the completion of resource extraction.  Early mining systems would go for the most obvious resource deposits, harvest as much as financially viable for the extraction system, lift off with a full load of cargo and let future explorers work for more difficult depoits

Hey robots, you've seen this blog 10k times

While getting ready to write a quick and dirty, real world applications of blog ideas I noticed that "My Cognitive Surplus" has recently reached 10k views, I'm assuming most of that is a result of various web-crawlers and bots, but hey, I'm assuming at least some of those views were people, and to the humans who have read, thank you for coming and I will try to keep the ideas flowing and if I really hunker down on the ol' discenprine (this is a reference to South Park) I will try to get more consistent about posting.  

Now to what I originally intended to post about.

Many moons ago I posted about a cool material being developed at Stanford that worked as a black-body radiator.  At the time I was under the impression that the material had to be optically opaque and as such outlined a design concept in my piece "Reflected Light Nano Materials and Better Solar Panels" (on a side note I need to get way better about titles), more recent research into this cool black body material has allowed for the substance to be optically transparent.  This is incredibly exciting, in a  nerdy engineering and science kind of way, as an optically transparent black body radiator means instead of convoluted side panels used to help cool solar panels, you are able to stack the cooling material directly onto the solar array.  While this stacking is unlikely to behave perfectly, read the additional cooling substance will slightly reduce the amount of light reaching the actual solar array, the net benefit of the cooling should outweigh energy losses from reduced light reaching the panel. 

Additionally this material could be a wonderful coating for windows in hotter regions of the planet, where light can be allowed to enter into a building while the heat can be kept at bay.  The trade off would be in balancing cooling during the day time and heat loss at night.  A side effect of constantly cooling  a system is that if the heat gain is variable, you need a way to reduce the cooling ability when heat is not being added to the system.  I can see a few options immediately come to mind.

Option 1)  have an air gap between the cooling system and the rest of the building, only when heat is being actively pumped between the air-gap and the building will sufficient cooling occur.

Option 2) shutters/curtains.  relatively straight forward, using mechanical shutters to physically block the thermal energy being radiated away from the building.  Said shutters do not need to be optically visible to work, they simply need to be able to either reflect or absorb the thermal radiation being released by the cooling system

Option 3) retractable cooling system, similar to shutters, the sections of the cooling material are put away when the desired thermal equilibrium has been achieved, in non-engineerese the cooling system stops cooling when the temperature is comfortable

Making Mountains into Couches

This is very much in the category of semi-useless but a lot of fun.  

Near my home town of Cordova, there is a mountain named Queen's Chair and loosely speaking it looks like a chair.  For years I have wondered, how comfortable would this mountain be if it was transformed into an actual chair and more importantly could an industry be made around making mountains into chair designs.  I would love for a company or service provider, allow me to choose a series of topological features, mountains, islands, canyons, and asteroids, and turn them into puffy memory foam furniture for homes, education spaces, and offices.  The big challenges for making these chairs is not the basic foam, CNC foam cutting machines should be reasonable, the real challenge is making the foam deform, when sat in, such that the foam becomes something the reasonable approximation of a comfortable seat.  The next challenge is the cover, simple two dimensional sheets are not going to look right, you need the cover for the couch that contours to the shape of the structure, so a manufacturing technique that allows dynamically producing covers that fit the mountain. 

Imagine in 20 years where various rapid prototyping technologies have lowered the barrier of entry to a "reasonable" cost how cool museums and visitor centers could be.  One could imagine the visitors center at the Grand Canyon, where children and adults can play in a miniature canyon with very little risk of injury as they bump into everything.  Or an office of some eccentric with their miniature Everest that they "ascend" every morning before sitting on the peak, allowing them to relive their glorious expedition where they were carried to the peak.

Changing the Light on a Thousand Worlds (or something)

This idea has been mocking me for completion, on my desktop, for let's say at least 6 months.

Space Exploration is, hopefully, the destiny of the human race and in some distant future we will try to colonize the wider galaxy.  One of the challenges of colonizing other planets is the available sunlight.  Some of the most common stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs, so if we can figure out how to make life around a red dwarf work, you can make colonization work in a large swath of the universe. The reason red dwarfs are potentially difficult to colonize is the amount of energy they radiate.  Unlike brighter stars, including the Earth's yellow sun, red dwarfs burn slowly, releasing the energy of fusing hydrogen and helium over a span of trillions of years.  This rate of energy output means that planets orbiting a red dwarf will be unlikely to receive enough energy to power the engine of an Earth like ecology. 

One potential solution, a modified Dyson swarm. For the uninitiated a Dyson swarm is a massive collection of artificial satellites orbiting a star, capturing as much energy as possible to power the needs of the satellite.  Instead of capturing the energy and locally consuming it, this modified design would redirect the energy of the star towards the planet(s), that is being terraformed.  The means of redirecting this energy are fairly legion, and that is with our current understanding of physics.  The image below gives a really crude example of what that could look like. 

Option 1) simple mirrors:  the name says it all and is pretty straight forward, sunlight hits a specially designed mirror, light is bounced roughly in the direction of the planet. Crude but reasonable.

Option 2) solar power converters, the individual elements of the swarm have solar collectors and some class of light emitter, the satellites capture the energy of the star, the broad spectrum energy is converted into electricity, which then powers some class of laser that aims light at the planet, (said lasers could be mono-chromatic or produce a range of useful light frequencies.

Option 3) Quantum dots.  This idea is similar to Option 2 but more sci-fi.  Quantum dots are cool pieces of material science where the piece captures energy in one part of the electromagnetic spectrum and re-emits that energy at a different frequency, examples include transforming infrared rays into visible light.  (there would probably need to be some mirrors to redirect the light emitted by the quantum dots.

These 3 options are broad categories and only indicate my inferences on possible solutions, others will most likely emerge if this idea is given credence.  

Challenges to this concept are legion, first and foremost, manufacturing and distributing these proposed swarm satellites, followed by how does a civilization guarantee that the satellites they use to ensure that the whole planet doesn't fall back into an ice-age.  

Positives of implementing light directing swarm. 

Multi-planet terraforming:  there are already proposals by engineers and science fiction authors to place arrays of mirrors at the langrangian points of Venus, Earth, and Mars to modify the quantity of solar radiation reaching these bodies with the hopes of regulating climates.  With a fully established swarm of satellites, a civilization bordering on Type 2 classification would have the ability to simultaneously regulate the climates of several worlds as opposed to a new array for each planet that needed to be modified.

Interplanetary trade would be far more feasible with a swarm of light directing satellites.  Depending on the level of sophistication of the swarm a civilization could provide highways of concentrated solar radiation, powering fleets of spaceships propelled by solar sails.

The planning required to produce this kind of swarm would be incredible, realistically building something as mind boggingly massive as a proper Dyson swarm would take centuries, but the benefits to the descendants of those who planned so far into the future would be tremendous.

Another thought before I go.  The nature of this kind of swarm, as opposed to more all encompassing proposals for modifying a star system, would ideally minimally impact the orbital plane that most planets find.  For researchers looking from Earth, I believe we would see the solar radiation of the star heavily modified, appearing compressed with semi-regular modifications to outputs that correspond to planetary orbits.  (honestly I'm talking out my ass here)

Edit 9/25/15:  I really should have re-read the Dyson Sphere entry on Wikipedia, in it they describe a range of designs, and consequently this entry is more of an example of a sub-category of development, that being said I still like the idea.

Ideas that Have Started to Happen

I have been meaning to write this post for a while, a post that highlights cool ideas that I wish I could claim I had been the inspiration for (my money is on convergent thought processes)

E-Ink in the keyboard. (similar to Keeping Your Input Dynamic) In the gizmag article Microsoft shows off a keyboard that has an e-ink multi-touch input device on the top row of the attachable keyboard, allowing for more inputs, similar to what I had imagined, (I should really get better about concept renders), although I wonder why they limited themselves to only the top of the keyboard.

Wired has an article about Dutch researcher's work into developing semi-transparent solar panels as a noise absorbing material, so the application is totally different than what I suggested in my semi-transparent solar panel article, but the core technology could be re-purposed for my suggestion, here's hoping the tech is cost effective enough for the greenhouse concept.

It is really exciting to see how seemingly sci-fi ideas are becoming reality.  Here's hoping I can make more updates like this, highlighting co-incidental innovations (or better, brag about bringing my ideas into RL)

Can I fix it

Relatively Simple Concept, really difficult execution
An app that lets you suggest a project you want to do, and through tracking your tool selection, knowledge of use, and available hardware, can suggest an estimated time to complete a project and calculate potential budget

Embedding Server Farms where the Power is

When Google or Microsoft want to build a server farm they do their best to build their facilities as close to major energy sources as possible.  The logic behind building their server farms close to energy sources is relatively simple the power is cheapest closest to the source.  Both companies have stated sustainability goals, Google to have all of its power produced by renewable energy sources and Microsoft to become carbon neutral, these sustainability goals, combined with our society's ravenous desire for cloud based services mean that unique solutions for powering server farms will become necessary as time goes on.  

Currently the majority of server farms are massive facilities covering thousands of square feet, what I would like to suggest is a complimentary server farm design that is intended to work with more distributed energy sources.  Instead of massive facilities organizations could invest in smaller systems designed to be installed right next to large scale wind turbines and solar arrays.  Under normal operations the distributed servers would operate at some baseline of data processing, when surplus power is being produced the servers would do scale up how much data they would crunch. 

These servers would most likely make the most sense serving as supplemental archival storage capacity and large scale data crunching where the time the processing completion time is more flexible.  The utilization of this capacity could be implimented in a range of ways, the servers could be owned out right by either cloud service providers, the power producer, or a 3rd party owner operator.  

Hopefully these smaller server arrays would also benefit from increased surface area, said increased surface area would mean more space for hot air to escape, assuming solar gain was not excessive.

Note to self add links for reference.