A simple question

Brooks, I appreciate your tortoise view of Human endeavor, but, all one has to do is look at Human history to see that it just doesnt work that way. History shoes us that progress is made primarilly in fits and starts, powered by new discoveries and environmental imperatives. Well never go to space in large numbers for science/government reasons, nor, do I think that tourism will drive more than a small percentage of the population to enter space- nor will most of these groups stay in space any more than tourists or govt. employees stay where theyre sent on Earth, they do their tours and go home. Pioneerism, driven by space to homestead and jobs to do will drive man to space. It interests me that you place these two driving factors at the very end of your list of drawing forces, and that you preface them by saying and one day passionate off world settlers and maybe even an environmental incentive to reduce our effects on this planet. These two incentives already exist. Branson and the other New Space companies that are working for space tourism have all agreed that tourism is merely a step toward their real goals of providing cheap reusable transport for people to get into space and to help drive the push to get man into space. the very forces that are driving CHANGE in our own nation and the world in general today are the same forces that will drive space habitation- People need employment; name a project that would employ more people than building habitats in space, People cant buy and hold on to a homestead on Earth any more; millions would sign up to work in space for the opportunity to own a piece of the new land; Given people living and working in space, mining becomes a very doable project; hundreds of families or small businesses will build mining ships with off the shelf tech and set out to an asteroid to claim, homestead and mine to make their fortunes, driving man farther and farter into the outer solar system, growing their families and splitting off as more asteroids, comets and moons are colonized. Given all these factors, I cannot see it taking more than five centuries tops before weve SETTLED most of the system in large numbers (I wont specify 5 billion, but I think it could easily exceed that figure).
Victor

From: brooksn
Sent: Saturday, March 03, 2012 8:10 AM
To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [spacesettlers] Re: : 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 mailto:spacesettlers%40yahoogroups.com, "Victor Smith" wrote: