Lunascaping and Zubrin

>
> When they turned the topic to terraforming Mars, they referred to it
> as a "new" idea, and seemed to leave the viewer with the implication
> this was a more-modern and more-practical alternative.
> [...]
> That's not how I'll ever look at it, no matter how farI get from the
> 20th Century. I'll always look at going to Mars and trying to figure
> out a way to live there as the older Goddard/Von Braun idea, and High
> Frontier as the better idea which came along later.

For a moment there I was hoping you were going to pop the new=>better
bubble, so I was a little disappointed to see it reemerge in your last
paragraph. I realize this is most likely a slip of the tongue
(fingers?) but I figured I say something about it anyway.

Perhaps it's a sign of age, but I'm coming to believe that new=>worse
at least as often as new=>better, if not more so. Particularly in areas
that have been thoroughly worked out, novelty is much more likely to be
a step backwards than a step forwards, just on simple probabilistic
grounds.

The interesting point is that when it comes to space colonization, we
are not dealing with a thoroughly worked out area - not even close. All
technical ideas in this area are equally poorly tested against
experience (with a few minor exceptions, mostly small subsystems which
are only peripherally relevant to large scale off-earth colonies).

The important caveat in the paragraph above is "technical" - we all
know that new technologies and new applications for old technologies
will be needed in order to sustain extraterrestrial colonies.
Fortunately it looks very much like those technologies needed are well
within reach, requiring only an investment of time and money in order
to bring them to maturity. The real problem is therefore how to bring
about the necessary investment of time and money. I believe that this
is a case where the relatively new ideas of Von Braun, O'Neill, and
Zubrin are completely wrong. All three (and indeed most people who have
published in this area) endorse what is effectively a monolithic
centrally planned approach to the problem. This is very much a 20th
century view, growing out of things like the Apollo project and the
large scale industrial projects of the 1930s such as Hoover Dam.
Unfortunately that is just not how frontiers have historically been
opened. History is full of examples of colonization and exploration,
but very few examples exist of centrally planned frontier opening.
Fewer still are the examples of successful central planning leading to
opening frontiers. There are many examples of government funded
enterprises aimed at exploration, but in nearly every case the
successful exploitation of the resources of the new frontier was
carried out by private enterprise.

Based on these observations, it seems to me that the route to the high
frontier must lie in private enterprise. This need not mean business
per se - recall that many of the private groups that settled the
frontier in what became the USA were religious sects. The government
has a role to play in lowering the risks associated with private
enterprise, most importantly by exploring (which reduces investment
risk by reducing unknowns). Government can also provide incentives
(such as the zero-g zero-tax proposal), but it cannot run the whole
show.

There's more to it than just government, though. Any enterprise that
requires huge amounts of capital to be expended before any income is
generated is necessarily going to run a much higher risk of failure
than enterprises which generate income in the shorter term and with
less up-front investment. In order to raise the kind of money needed,
either the promised payoff must be simply enormous, or the risk must be
negligible. There is no way for SPS to meet these criteria at present.
This doesn't mean that none of O'Neill's ideas are good, it just
requires reexamining them with an eye to reduction in initial
investment, and rearranging them in order to make them more friendly to
private enterprise. In the short term that means ditching SPS and
massive stations. In the longer term it means that both SPS and Island
One (through Island 200, let's hope) will be privately owned and
operated, and designed to respond to the needs of the market as it
exists when they are built.

I've gone way past my initial point here, so I'll stop. There's plenty
more on my mind, but I'll save it for another post.

.......Andrew

> --
Dr. Andrew Case, PhD.
Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics,
University of Maryland, College Park
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
- David Hume