Vulnerability of Space Settlements to Attacks

From: "Al Globus"
To:
Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2002 5:48 PM
Subject: Re: [spacesettlers] Vulnerability of Space Settlements to Attacks

> The two nukes we dropped on Japan killed about 100,000 people each.
> Assuming space colonies run around 10,000 per, each nuke will kill much
> fewer people.
>

I would not think that space colonies will stay at the "lower bound" of
10,000 people forever. I see no technical reasons to not build colonies for
100,000 people or more - indeed, if Earth-like interiors are dropped in
favor of a full occupation of the internal volume, even an Island One-sized
colony could house 100K people with a lot of room per capita.

However, I do concede that *economical* reasons may postpone the building of
big colonies to the far future. Human civilizations are not used to build a
whole city from scratch and then populate it; instead, we are used to grow
cities in incremental steps by adding new buildings as needed. We cannot do
the same thing with a space colony. And I would guess that are few (or none)
buildings in the world housing more than 10,000 people - and, although there
are projects for ber-buildings 2 Km high housing 100,000 people, those
projects never left their blueprints.

>
> --
> Al Globus
> CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
> aglobus@..., (650) 604-4404
> http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html
>
> The dinosaurs weren't spacefaring. We are. I don't think that's an
> accident. Maybe we are life's taxi to the stars.
[snikt]

Lucio Coelho