NEO or HEO?

I agree that having only a 2-3 day travel time to/from Earth is an advantage of HEO versus NEOs.

As for birds and/or large mammals, I think that initially space colonists ought not expect to have them, or at least not initially. Personally, I like nothing better than cooking up a fine piece of meat on my grill in the backyard, but I think that would-be space colonists had better plan at least initially on eating a diet of vegetables, bugs, krill, and vitamin pills. Maybe eventually they might progress to chickens and rabbits, but I tend to think that would not be in the first habitats.

Thanks for the reference to George Friedman.

Ron Menich

"Combs, Mike"
07/16/2001 08:13 AM

I appreciate that being close would be a good thing in emergency situations. However, the specific example you gave --- sudden need for a particular bacteria strain in order to prevent ecosystem collapse --- seems to me to be one of the more easily solved problems. Thousands upon thousands of species of bacteria could be frozen and just taken along to the habitat in case they were needed in some future emergency. This insurance would be very small in mass, and would avert the problem you mention. Perhaps the same could be done for insects, too; I'm not sure.
You make a good point, which I think only means that I picked a very bad example to make my point. What if we need a certain type of bird, or maybe even a large mammal? We might could take a small collection of bird eggs to a NEO, even including a few species we don't anticipate needing outside of some totally unexpected development, but we certainly couldn't take Noah's Ark with us.

I say having the entire biosphere of the Earth only 2-3 days travel time away would be a tremendous advantage, at least at the start-up phase. Of course later generations of orbital habitats will purchase their start-up flora and fauna from already-established habitats, not from Earth. I expect us to steadily range farther and farther from Earth as time goes on, but I also expect the process to start in High Earth Orbit.

Regards,

Mike Combs