--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Victor Smith" wrote:
> the optimal Human grouping is a village, coincidentally, the perfect social unit for the Diaspora.

"I used to have a very romantic idea about villages, and that's because I never lived in one." --Stewart Brand (at 2:19 in the following video):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUxwiVFgghE

The point in your footage was that the village was a cut off backwater reduced to nothing but subsistence farming. I fail to see how this is applicable to space settlement. I was positing an optimal size for a self contained, highly technological habitat with full access to instantaneous communication and hookups (probably neural by then) to whatever interplaNET happens to be in vogue at the time. Were talking a group of like minded people living in a park-like environment with micro-G bioengineered crops grown in external farm modules, as much power as needed straight from the sun or a fusion reactor, high speed neuro-networks for project work and educational materials from pre-history up to and including the most advanced sciences. Imagine a community where each individual member has a full say in governing and decision making, a kind of participatory Democracy that no ones ever had the chance to experience on this planet. As for interacting and being a part of the bigger, bustling, squatter city that Earth will have become by then, think of people who live outside a metro area, yet do quite well for themselves and their companies by telecommuting every day. So to reiterate my statement from before, please, you can keep your teeming masses yearning for warrens, Ill take the wild star strewn yonder.

From: hitssquad
Sent: Friday, March 09, 2012 5:45 PM
To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [spacesettlers] The village people vs. Stewart Brand (was Re: We already live inside, all toget)

--- In mailto:spacesettlers%40yahoogroups.com, "Victor Smith" wrote:
> the optimal Human grouping is a village, coincidentally, the perfect social unit for the Diaspora.

"I used to have a very romantic idea about villages, and that's because I never lived in one." --Stewart Brand (at 2:19 in the following video):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUxwiVFgghE