A simple question

Thinking about the magnitude of building 5,000 1 million person sized space habitats and then launching those 5 billion into orbit. We would have to get massive industrialization of space, something we are very far from doing but will be done over time. We'd have to have a market to 'pull' everything up there, and besides tourism and science/government, nothing else is really there yet nor can reasonably be expected to be there soon. SPS might not ever be considered economically viable, and mining to the degree that needs a serious human presence to draw people up is at least 100 years off, if mostly robot controlled miners don't replace the need for large numbers of people first. So the draw for humans is tourism, science/government/exploration, small number of miners, and one day passionate off world settlers and maybe even an environmental incentive to reduce our effects on this planet.

If humanity threw huge support, meaning 10% of world GDP into it, yeah we could do it in 500 years, but at a reasonable pace I see a couple of thousand years to get 5 billion in orbit.
Brooks

>Al Globus
>I think you are pessimistic on the time scale. There have been
>designs for 1,000,000 person orbital settlements. 5,000 of these
>would hold 5 billion people. The worlds population has increased by 5
>billion in the last couple of centuries. Getting to the point of
>building really large settlements could easily take a couple of
>centuries, so we might be able to do this in less than 1,000 years.

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Victor Smith" wrote: