Flying Algae IN SPACE!!!!!

Simple fact of life that evolved on Earth, well technically most life that evolved on Earth, and by life I mean animal life, tangents are growing, back on track.  A simple fact of animal life on Earth is that organisms like humans, whales, and nerds all need oxygen to survive.  When we are not on planet Earth, we humans will often use advanced chemistry to filter out carbon dioxide and electrolysis to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen to replace the carbon dioxide that was scrubbed out.  (Honestly the electrolysis thing is surprising to me, before I started writing this piece 10 minutes ago, I sincerely thought we had a chemical approach to at least partially directly recycle the waste gases made by the crew)  This is a problem for long term exploration, if each breath of fresh O2 crew members need to breath in needs to be shipped up, via compressed air or chemically split water, your astronauts are going to be a tad too dependent on home base.  NASA researchers and science fiction authors have put forth a myriad of solutions suggesting ways that plant life could be used to offset at least some of the crews oxygen production means.  Some of my favorites include, specially bred plants with limited musculature that contracts and expands regularly causing air to move (I will try to add a link to the title of the sci-fi novel that has that idea later, found them, book 3 of the Night's Dawn Trilogy* ), in Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky the author describes a space fairing civilization that ensures that every ship no matter the size has some kind of small garden inside even if it is only a small terrarium, NASA is more pragmatically developing small hydroponic systems to grow lettuce.  My suggestion takes inspiration from all of these ideas, creating a series of small semi-autonomous robotic growth media that are intended to float around the inside of space craft, providing air filtration, visual stimuli, and in emergencies a means to mitigate air from going stale.    

This last detail I will give a little background, actually I won't, after 20 minutes of research it turns out I can't find a link to the story I thought I had read.  The story that I do have is that of Astronaut Jerry Linenger and the Mir 23 crew. During the Mir 23 mission of series of disasters including fires inside of Mir and spacecraft collisions, astronauts and cosmonauts faced a litany of challenges including losing power.  The detail that I thought I remembered, but cannot find a reference to, so this may be just unreliable memory, is that when the Mir crew lost power, they had to manually fan the air around them to avoid CO2 build up.  (if I find the reference I shall add it in, if not well uhh, the false memory served as a source of inspiration)**

Anyways back to the idea, small robotic vehicles with semi-independent power supplies, designed to fly around the inside of a space craft.  One potential version could have the vehicles embedded with special LEDs intended to serve two distinct but equally beneficial uses.  The first is illumination for the plants/algae that grow on the robot, ensuring that the plants have sufficient energy to grow and provide enough clean air. The second feature is to aid in the sleep cycles of crew members, by increasing the relative ratios of red and blue light according to the time of day, astronauts might have an easier time falling asleep.  Roughly speaking, if you increase the amount of blue light people experience in their environment, they are more prone to being awake, if you increase the amount of red light in the environment, people are more likely to feel sleepy.  As plants only really use red and blue light to photosynthesis, it is not that unreasonable to carefully change the light output of the grow lights to accommodate the crew, and the plants, hopefully should not be any worse for the wear.

I hope you enjoy the concept, anyways I should go to bed, if so inspired I shall add conceptual renders down the line, or shitty drawings (the more likely scenario)

*Seriously, I highly recommend reading the Night's Dawn Trilogy, I read the books 10 years ago and many of the ideas have stuck with me.

(12/16/2015)**so i can't find the story about MIR, but someone posted an article on Reddit from the ESA on how astronauts need to sleep next to air ventilation systems to avoid suffocate in their own carbon dioxide.

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)