> You don't know it's rubbish unless you at least skim the article. As
> den Beste points out there are more than engineering calculations to
> make a good settlement; he outlines some social problems as well.
And exaggerates them. Most grossly, he seems to think that the idea is to build one space habitat with 100,000 people and then build no more of them ever, so that the population has to be kept at a steady state for generations, with a monthly quota of babies and children to be trained in specific numbers for the various professions. I'm reminded of the bloke who thought space habitats ecologically unviable because no ecosystem as simple as a lawn can be stable in isolation, and he figured without reasoning why that an ecosystem in a space habitat could never be more complex than that. Therefore space settlement belonged to the realm of science fiction, not in a forum dedicated to serious discussions of space. I'm also reminded of the bloke, two years my elder, during my teen years who argued that space habitats could never be viable because we humans are hunters by instinct, and you cannot go hunting in a space habitat. A few days later he admitted that his argument had been devised because he rejected the concept for its radical novelty. Den Beste's argument that we have to cancel a very great momentum in incoming loads of lunar material reminds me of the New York Times' refutal of Goddard's plans to fly rockets in the vacuum of space: any real physicist would "of course" know that rockets cannot work in a vacuum because they have no air to push against.
Jon Lennart Beck.
