Human pollution leads to environmental stability!

> I wonder how difficult it will be to engineer a stable climate in a
> Habitat considering new data that appears to point to a very
> unstable Earth environment that has been stabilized over the last
> few millenia by the activities of humans.
>

The Earth is so much larger that it may not be a good model for an
orbital space colony. Biosphere II provides one relevant data point.
They didn't distribute a lot of detailed data, but from what I could
tell at the time there was a lot of human intervention necessary to
keep things on a even keel. They were, however, able to keep the
system very close to closed for over a year. Oxygen replenishment
eventually became necessary (proving, incidentally, that the closure
was excellent). That's pretty good for the first try.

The Russians and American space programs have done some much smaller
closed system experiments, but I don't have the papers. Anyone?

The problem with my posts is a quirk in the way I have my mailing lists
set up. If I'm not careful it happens. There actually is a message
there, it just looks like a response.

The dinosaurs were destroyed by an asteroid because they weren't
space-faring. It's almost as if Gaia then thought "Well, dinosaurs
worked pretty well, but space-faring is necessary. Maybe I'll should
try mammals this time." Humanity is now developing systems to detect
and deflect asteroids, and could build orbital space colonies to spread
beyond Earth to insure life would survive a planetary catastrophe.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

Views expressed in this email are only my opinions and are not the
position of any organization I'm familiar with.