From: ssi_list@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:ssi_list@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Don Davis

Shared in response to some references to
shrill commentary elsewhere,
but worth passing along...

SPACE RAPTURE: Extraterrestrial
Millennialism and the Cultural
Construction of Space Colonization by
Ryan Jeffrey McMillen, B.A.,
M.A. Dissertation Presented to the
Faculty of the Graduate School of
The University of Texas at Austin.

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/etd/d/2004/mcmillend92689/mcmillend92689.pdf

It is auguable here and there, but a
fantastic piece of work.

We'll, I've only just now finished it with gritted teeth. I have
serious problems with this.

First off, a disclaimer. I'm probably what McMillen would consider a
prime suspect for what he's talking about. Although I'm an agnostic and
a humanist, both of my parents were fundamentalist Christians, and yes,
I was raised in a tradition of Rapture followed by Tribulation. Still,
on that day as a high-schooler when I first beheld a magazine cover with
an illustration of Island One, I can't believe the quickening in my
pulse came from the thought, "Great! The world's going to hell in a
hand basket, and if I was instead here when that happened, I'd be safe."
I still feel strongly that the excitement I felt came from thoughts of
going to new places not yet visited by man, and seeing and experiencing
things I could not while on the Earth.

McMillen does the same with O'Neill as do all deep ecologists:
Attributing to his thought processes a disposable Earth ideology,
ignoring his many statements to the contrary.

Philosophers are frequently out of their depth when trying to discuss
technical matters, and McMillen certainly is here. He imagines
O'Neill's supposed disdain for the Earth coming out in his comparison to
climbing out of a deep hole, perhaps unaware that physicist routinely
think of spacetime as a flat rubber sheet with celestial bodies making
holes of varying depths. He takes the curious argument that a powerful
motivation of O'Neill and a chief benefit of his proposals is "the
rapture of 0-G", while at the same time acknowledging the considerable
thought O'Neill put into providing what would feel like normal Earth
gravity for space settlers. (Marshall Savage, who proposes living
permanently in 0-G, might be more open to the accusation of being
besotted with weightlessness.)

McMillen seems of the misunderstanding that O'Neill's proposal stood or
fell on whether or not weightless living could be provided, and asserted
that the Summer Study's attraction to the torus was a repudiation of
everything O'Neill ever stood for. Even if so, he perhaps did not
realize that residents of a Stanford Torus would be able to enjoy low
and 0-G at the hub, needing only an elevator trip to get there.

In truth, O'Neill extolling the entertainment possibilities of low-G was
an example of O'Neill the showman. He realized that an academic might
get motivated by abstract concepts of removing limits to growth, but
that Joe Six-pack was more likely to be stirred by thoughts of what he
could do on a basketball court in 1/10 G.

Providing low-G living was never the primary goal of High Frontier
(indeed, it's the only space settlement proposal holding out the promise
of normal 1-G living). Arguing at cross-purposes, McMillen at the same
time asserts that the Stanford Torus ruled out low-G living, and that
Winkler's insistence anything beyond 1 RPM was a mistake meant O'Neill's
entire concept was torpedoed, seeming to not realize that if lower RPMs
were necessary, lower G living would be the inevitable result.

The part where he says O'Neill, "either erred, or lied," regarding first
habitat model dimensions in his congressional testimony derives entirely
from McMillen's confusion between the Model 1/2/3/4 nomenclature of the
original Physics Today paper, and the Island 1/2/3 naming convention
used later.

McMillen seems incapable of distinguishing between near-term space
habitat models which Earth might build, and long-term models which will
only get built by a future space-based civilization not yet in
existence, and implies that if a NASA study says that a particular thing
will be terribly expensive by today's techniques then it proves O'Neill
is all wet.

He asserts that the first Summer Study was very pessimistic about much
of what O'Neill had asserted, and that the second one was even more
critical. (Does anybody else have that impression? I had considered
them ringing endorsements.) The second study might well have emphasized
space industrialization more highly than large, Earthlike habitats
because not only NASA but O'Neill himself was becoming more interested
in near-term activities.

Unless I horribly misunderstand him, McMillen makes the jaw-dropping
assertion that the reason why NASA stopped funding space settlement
studies past a point was because the model designs had evolved to the
point that direct views out the windows of the Earth, moon, and universe
were no longer possible, causing everyone to lose interest. (I myself
had always felt that whenever space artists put these kind of things
into their illustrations that it was more a bit of fancy than
technically realistic.) In my opinion, McMillen places far too much
emphasis on this. In any case, any space habitat should have
observation bays at the hub permitting unobstructed views of the outside
universe.

To my understanding, NASA stopped funding High Frontier studies during
the transition from an agency flush with having landed men on the moon
within the deadline to an agency which felt that it couldn't even
justify studies in support of sending a few humans to Mars. Supporting
10,000 in HEO is probably on the far side of the audacity of sending 4
or 6 to Mars, despite happening closer to home.

But McMillen's undue emphasis on aesthetics is pervasive. He appears to
think O'Neill came to certain design aspects from aesthetics owing to
ancient religious mythologies rather than from the laws of physics. But
space habitats are like inside-out worlds simply because outside-out
worlds would not hold the air in.

He quotes O'Neill as saying that certain letters were "very helpful in
forcing me to go into detail and justify on a numerical basis things
which I hadn't taken the time to calculate, because I just had had a
sort of hunch that the numbers would work out all right." and then
darkly opines that, "In other words, O'Neill admitted that he was
operating from a hunch ... This was, on its face, an inherently
faith-based perspective." Thus O'Neill stands starkly revealed as... a
human being. I suppose only an android could become the perfect
scientist.

More irksome is McMillen's cherry-picking of facts. If a prominent NASA
administrator turns out to be a sincere, church-going Christian (not
exactly long odds in the U.S. of A.), then that's held up as damning
evidence. But if the father of space settlement himself happens to be
an irreligious humanist, then we leave O'Neill's religious background
unmentioned, and instead have curious discussions of the resemblance
between O'Neill habitats and Dante's heavens and hells.

Another possible example of cherry picking is the fact that despite
having been written in 2004, this paper makes no mention at all of
Zubrin or his Mars proposals, despite this being the dominant space
settlement meme throughout all of the 90's to today. I suppose this is
left out only because going to settle in a red desert is difficult to
shoehorn into the Christian millennialist mold.

One might wonder if McMillen only objects to the orbital variety of
space settlement, considering Mars settlement to be OK. But that's
contradicted by his statement at the very end where he advocates that
when we do go to the stars, we do so in the manner of "a hiker in the
wilderness". A hiker never builds a log cabin in that wilderness.
McMillen's thesis is an across-the-board repudiation of space settlement
of any kind.

Ultimately, it's possible to turn the tables on him here though, and
argue that the kind of extreme environmentalists who react so negatively
to the O'Neill meme are perhaps themselves motivated by a kind of
adherence to a Christian myth.

I can't think of the name of the writer who came up with this, but bear
with me. He asked us to imagine a thought experiment where a man is
revealed to have the power to heal the sick with a touch of his hand.
The problem: In any given day over a thousand people will be desperately
seeking his healing powers. How can the man do what's morally right
while at the same time having the time to eat, sleep, go to the
bathroom, and have a life of his own? The writer of this scenario
suggested a moderate-speed conveyor belt. The healer could sit in a
chair with his hand outstretched. The conveyer could sweep a thousand
or so people past his healing hand in the course of a few hours, freeing
up the rest of the healer's day for a partly-normal life.

The writer's point was this: There are those who would immediately
reject this proposed solution. Why? Does it fail to meet the practical
need of the sick? No. Does it fail to provide the healer with a
solution for having some time to himself? No. Why, then, the
objection? It will simply be this: Some will object because it's
perceived to be a technological solution to what they see as an ethical
problem requiring an ethical solution. A technological end-run around
the ethical dilemma is cheating.

The writer then asserted that deep ecologists who object to the O'Neill
solution are like this. Their world view is similar to the story of
humanity cast out of Eden. People in ancient times are conceived
(against the archeological evidence) as having lived in a state of
perfect balance with the natural environment, having not yet "known the
sin" of technological development. When humanity has the temerity to
partake of the tree of knowledge, this perfect paradise is lost. Such
environmentalists are not interested in any solutions to the kinds of
problems they decry outside of living with less, restraining economic
development, and voluntary reductions in our standard of living. In a
sense, we must do penance for our technological sins. Then along comes
O'Neill, arguing that we can enjoy our technological "sinning" while
avoiding the penance. This provokes righteous indignation. Thus,
extreme environmentalists may themselves be playing out a kind of
Christian-inspired mythology.

Regards,

Mike Combs

This guy has a few problems with facts. He calls O'Neill a 'rocketeer,'
but O'Neill didn't work with rockets. He also says O'Neill failed (true
enough) because in the late 60s people started thinking about peaceful
living on Earth -- but O'Neill did his space colony work in the 70's.

At 09:35 AM 6/28/2006, you wrote:

From: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Al Globus

> This guy has a few problems with facts. He calls O'Neill a
'rocketeer,'
> but O'Neill didn't work with rockets. He also says O'Neill failed
(true
> enough) because in the late 60s people started thinking about peaceful

> living on Earth -- but O'Neill did his space colony work in the 70's.

Yeah. I remember back in the day when I was first researching High
Frontier and came across Marshal McLuhan's comment that "To colonize
space would be to become unhumans." At that time I certainly didn't
have any well-formed negative opinions of the social science field. And
it was many years before it was demonstrated to the world that a
prankster could turn in a paper of intentional nonsense, albeit
sprinkled with the right kind of leftist seasonings, to a prestigious
social science journal and see it published. But even at that time it
occurred to me the situation was very unfair. To do his work, all
McLuhan had to do was turn a pithy phrase and craft a new word and he
was done. Meanwhile, look at all that hard work Gerard O'Neill had to
do buttressing his arguments and strengthening the foundations of his
concepts.

McMillen's entire paper strikes me as nothing more than, "This thing
reminds me of this other thing, and I can draw comparisons between this
and that. Aren't you glad for the profound new insights into the
situation that I'm offering you?" (And I think it's typical of the
modern social science field.) Meanwhile, O'Neill felt compelled to
solve many complex equations, point to real-world engineering and
technical examples, and build working mass driver models before feeling
justified in hoping that there might be some benefit to the new insights
he offered the world.

Regards,

Mike Combs

There were a few howlers that stuck out among the underbrush,
like the Arthur C. Clarke quote from the 1920's that McMillen
dutifully cites from William Sims Bainbridge (ref. 222, p.157).

Two issues with this come to mind:

1) Attributing the quote to the British Interplanetary Society;
it didn't even exist until 1933.

2) Arthur C. Clarke was born in 1917, which means he was
getting published as a pre-teen in brochures put out by said
non-existant society.

I agree with Don that it's rather well written; at least for me,
I think it was slowly building anger that kept me clicking
through, as I didn't see fit to waste good paper dumping it to
hard copy.

Sloppy scholarship, combined with a curious ability to write and
a philosophical axe to grind. By the way, Bainbridge has a book
on the same topic ("Goals in Space") on his website:

http://mysite.verizon.net/wsbainbridge/system/goals.pdf

Shane

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Combs, Mike" wrote: