What if.......?

--- In spacesettlers@egroups.com, "bill t" wrote:

Bill;
Greetings from Canberra,

>You have asked three questions which I will paraphrase if you don't
>mind.

I don't mind at all, feel free to express your thoughts in any way
you please. It is useful to see if we are really talking about the
same thing and avoids confusion.

>About Shangri-La...
>I don't if anyone has ever lived in Buffalo, but the place gets a
>tonne of snow every year. On the other hand New Orleans doesn't have
>this problem. In fact New Orleans as a city shuts down when they see
>a
>couple of centimeters. Why am I talking about snow in New Orleans? It
>illustrates the point. In Buffalo where they expect snow they have
>built the infrastructure to deal with it.

Snow is not something most people in Australia see much of, I happen
to live in Canberra, one of the few cities were we have snow fall
albeit very rare, in fact only a very light dusting in a few parts of
the city each year and many years with none. But I understand what
you are talking about, just about every part of Australia is subject
to bush fire and we are quite accustomed to regular burnings.

>In space habitats, the people will build the infra-structure to deal
>with the problems unique to space condition. Nobody on earth thought
>mold would be a problem on the MIR.

This is true but many of the problems they had with Mir and without
doubt will have with the IIS relate to life in a small space and
micro-g. A large habitat will have it's own problems but should only
have the type of trouble Mir had in the area around the axis. In
fact I suspect as soon as the first large habitat is built all kinds
of problems will make life uncomfortable and they will quickly be
dealt with but I really wonder what kind of strange weather they
might be making for themselves in truly large habitat.

>Will space-stations be a shangri-La. That depends on how good the
>infra-structure is for sovling the problems.

I don't disagree with this however I wasn't really talking about the
physical environment but the social one. With no disrespect to Mike
Combs, you should have a look at the images on his website or any of
the art showing life in a habitat ( I really like the artwork Mike,
just using your site because it has such a good collection ;-).
Happy families at play by babbling brooks or strolling though park
like forests. Is this possible? Without a doubt. Is it likely? Not
so certain but still possible. Is it going to utopia? Not a
chance. There is still going to people who get into fights and
others who think the things in your house would look better in
theirs, the mortgage payments will still have to made and kids will
still give parents grey hairs. In other words life is still going to
need to handled just like here. To all the normal stresses you live
with now you can add the worry that somebody with a desire to make
headlines is going to make a home brew bomb big enough to crack your
big windows, chance is going to really deal you a foul hand and
mutate some harmless bug into something that will tear though your
enclosed population like the black death or nobody saw that big rock
that is almost on top of you and now you can't move the habitat out
of the way. Am I going overboard a bit? Well, yes but the idea is a
lot of people sit and wonder about how to make a habitat work, what
kind of thing to build it out of, how to dump the extra heat, how do
you keep the water clean and so on. They tend to forget to work out
how the people are going to work, what kind of social setting will
the habitat have, how will it's internal economy work, is it just an
outpost of the nation that built it or is it an independent nation
itself and if so, what do the people who built it think of this or
how about the rest of the world?

>About Geo-Politics...
>This is probably the main reason why there has been little real
>innovation in the last 30 years. Before everyone screams I'm wrong,
>ask yourself how many things we are enjoying today could have been
>built a decade ago, or two decades ago. Todays gigahertz risc
>processors were in prototypes 10 years ago. I know I was helping
>manufacture them at U of T. The research I did in superconductors
>(which was cutting edge at the time) has yet to show up in any
>products.
>
>Today the rate of research is so high, that the markets can't recoup
>the initial costs fast enough, so products don't ever get on the
>market because of the risk.
>
>Now add to that the self-interest of big business and government.
>First big business. Had the car manufacturer decided to start
>building
>natural gas powered vehicles in 1980, the U.S. would be self
>sufficient in fuel today. If you think I'm wrong, remember the U.S.
>has the largest supply of coal in the world, and the production of
>methane from coal has been possible since the 1920's. But that would
>have put the large oil companies out of business.
>
>Government: What could the U.S. do if a colony decided to revolt the
>way they did in 1776. How do you fight a war with a group of people
>that could focus a mirror onto New York city and melt it? How do you
>fight a group of people when your intercontinental missles can't
reach
>them, while there simplest weapons could annihilate your population.
>
>If the U.S can't fight a war against a group of settlers, what other
>country could?

No need to use a mirror, in fact no point, if you could build a
habitat then your missiles could reach it but it takes time. No if I
was going to war with a nation on Earth then I would drop rocks on
them, big rocks and lots of them, followed by lots of little rocks,
because they are harder to hit.

>About Asteroids...
>This is exactly how I would build the first asteroid settlement. Go
>out there with as little as possible and build everything you need.
>
>For settlements in Orbit, unless we get real lucky and capture a
>small
>asteroid naturally this is not going to happen.
>
>Bill

Rebuilding an asteroid into a habitat is an idea I like but I don't
know if it is the cheapest and let's face it, cheapest is what will
happen. If you hollow out and spin a good sized rock, with the right
kind of bracing to stop it from flying apart you can make it strong
enough to make most people feel nice and safe (I know that is only an
illusion but most people live with this kind of illusion all the
time) and quell some of the worries I was talking about before.

With all of above I still feel that the greatest hurdle to building a
habitat will the people down here who are against such things for
reasons of ideology. Never underestimate the power of human
stupidity.

Darren Brown