Flat Earthers

First off, I know I'm preaching to the choir, here. It's very
doubtful that whoever wrote this (Space and planetary settlement)
will be back. Idealistic hit & run posters, who don't stick around to
hear feedback.
Sometimes, they can be debated with, and occasionally, they will
admit that we've got some good points, and that maybe they were wrong
in some cases.

The weak argument about achieving effective reycling before we go to
space is particularly lame.
The points about energy which have been raised in response to them
are good. Somebody on the LUF's message boards wrote something
memorable recently: "Landfills are the mines of the future". I'll
submit that the technologies & energy from space are key.
Furthermore, space settlements probably won't have much room in
their vocabulary for the word "recycle". It'll be so fundamental to
their whole way of life, that it's nonsense to urge it. These people
will make their living habitat and the food they grow their children
with out of _rock_! If you have a piece of packaging that's seen its
use, or a busted appliance, it won't be thrown away, because it's a
concentrated lump of refined resources. If nothing else, they can use
focussed sunlight to take anything apart down to its constituent
molecules.

Recycling efforts on Earth won't hit their stride until space
settlers show us how.
If nothing else, use SSPS energy to power laser launchers, to lift
totally useless pollutants to space, to drop into the Sun's corona.
(by the way, we do actually have a good Earthbound disposal for
anything: encase it in concrete, and bury it at a tectonic subduction
zone. It gets carried under the lithosphere, to re-emerge a few
hundred million years later as a few atoms per cubic km of lava
basalt.)

The points they made about spirituality really show their kind for
what they are. They rightly say that most sources of info about space
habitation say nothing about spirituality or belief systems. O'Neill
for one did this deliberately, and said so. He, and other space
writers advocate _choices_ for the future.

On the other hand, most people I run into who are steadfastly
against a human migration into space have a definate statement on
what they think others should believe...
If we stay on "Only One Earth" we don't have any choices except
crushing restrictions on choices and freedoms.
Most of the time it's anti-technology -as if technology itself is
responsible for the evils. Frequently, they have less qualms about
killing off 3 or 4 billion people than they have about most
technology we have today.
Technology by the way, is a reason why we don't have the horrendous
infant mortality of a pre-technological civilization.

Last year, I was at a steering commitee meeting for the Mars
Society.
There was a presentation at CU by Zubrin, Stoker, and McKay called
"the Way to Mars". Stoker fielded a question from the audience that
verged on anti-technology, and the "think Small, Use Less, Only One
Earth" mentality.
She was the first one I heard say that there's a radical arm of the
environmentalist movoment which should be called the Voluntary Human
Extinction Movement.
A few months later, this was brought to my attention:
The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement: "May we live long and die
out"
http://vhemt.org/