space habitats

Victor, I agree with most of your general sentiments, but some of the
details you're relying on aren't quite accurate.

> Pollution is at an all time high, causing untold damage to
> ecosystems worldwide, but especially in Asia, an area heretofore spared
> the major costs of industrial endeavor and a massive population transfer
> from rural to metropolitan areas.

It's certainly true that pollution in China is higher than ever, and
they're a big chunk of the world. But in the western world, where the
Industrial Revolution came first, it is a LOT better now than it was in
the first half of last century.

I couldn't quickly find a nice graph since 1900, but here's one for the
U.S. since 1980 -- total emissions in the U.S. have decreased 63% since
then.

http://www.epa.gov/airtrends/aqtrends.html#comparison

> While we have yet to experience wide
> spread material shortfalls, there are few who would disagree that
> certain things have become exceedingly expensive: Petroleum Products,
> household and commercial energy, food and water to name a few.

Petroleum products: the chief one here is gasoline. Adjusted for
inflation (the red line in the graph below), gas price in the U.S. has
been bouncing around $3/gallon (in 2013 dollars) since 1918.

http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/Gasoline_Inflation.asp

Of course I do believe oil is getting harder (and more expensive) to
obtain, but demand for gas is also starting to slip as cars become more
efficient, and face competition from electric vehicles. So both supply
and demand are going down. How exactly the balance of those will tip is
hard to predict.

Household and commercial energy: primarily electricity. I couldn't find
good long-term trend data on this, but I did find several forecasts
suggesting that electricity is poised to become substantially more
expensive soon. (That'd be a good thing for SPS, perhaps.)

Food: since the mid-20th century, food globally has been cheaper than at
any previous point in history. In the last ten years it has gone up a
bit (due to a lot of factors, though the ethanol fuel movement is the
one that annoys me most). But it's still darned cheap; the average
person spends more on entertainment than on food. (Source: Al Gore's
latest book, which is stuffed with facts and figures like this, though
it's a rather dry and rambling read.)

Water: I couldn't find any data on this either. I do know that my own
family doesn't worry about the water bill (and we live in arid
Colorado); it's way down on our list of monthly expenses. Of course
fresh water is a limiting resource in many parts of the world. But I
wish I could find hard data before claiming a trend there.

> While
> there are still vast resources on (and in) Planet Earth, they are no
> longer simple and easy to acquire. Each kilogram of ore taken from the
> Earth costs more than the one preceding it, whether because of
> increasingly remote or deeper locations must be accessed, or because
> fuel and power costs skyrocket weekly, or because more control is
> exerted to ensure that such operations no longer ruin the land around
> them

Again, I'd want to see data supporting this, because in opposition to
the factors you mention, is the basic law of technology: productivity
always goes up, making it cheaper and faster to obtain or make pretty
much anything. This especially applies to industrial processes. So,
even though some particular ore may be getting more scarce, and we
better honor our moral obligations to the environment, we may STILL be
able to get it cheaper today than we did yesterday, thanks to new tech
and economies of scale.

> Food becomes more difficult to grow worldwide due to the
> degrading of the environment, causing great famines and the plagues that
> accompany them

There haven't been any great famines for a long time. Ethiopia, once
the poster child for starving African nations, is poised to become a net
food exporter:

http://danielberhane.com/2012/05/01/ethiopia-could-now-become-food-exporter-le-temps-2/

There are no indications I know of suggesting that food is becoming more
difficult to grow; agricultural productivity continues to rise even in
developed nations, and in underdeveloped ones, it's *really* taking off.

This isn't to say I'm a rose-colored-glasses optimist. I see a lot of
cause for concern. But it's important to be concerned about the *right*
things, and admit frankly where things are going well (such as food
production), so we can focus attention where we really need to (such as
more aggressively reducing oil consumption).

> And, since ignoring or stating that the problem doesnt exist does
> nothing to SOLVE the problem

True. But neither does inventing or exaggerating problems.

> Well NEVER significantly relieve the population pressures on Earth
> (barring a Nuclear or plague solution), but we CAN siphon off from that
> huge surplus a substantial workforce of bright motivated problem
> solvers, put them IN SPACE, and set them to designing solutions, 1st to
> the problems of establishing an industrial and residential base IN SPACE
> that will be capable of beginning the acquisition of resources, from
> multiple sources, to deploy as habitats, SSP units, R&D labs, etc.

I would hope that someday, when Earth is only one small part of
humanity's sphere, we'll be able to gradually increase protections for
it, imposing more and more strict limits to what people can do to it
(and how many can live there). This will be possible (and humane) only
when there are great places to live elsewhere. And maybe it will prove
politically impossible anyway -- but I think this should be the goal.

Cheers,
- Joe