What if.......?

--- In spacesettlers@egroups.com, "Darren Brown" wrote:
>
> Okay, to start, a while ago I discussed with Mike what I thought
was
> the problem that some, not all of the people pushing the idea of
> orbital habitats have with looking at reality, they seem to believe
> that life in a habitat is going to be some kind of paradise on
Earth
> or rather above Earth. That all the troubles and problems that
plague
> us down here will magically disappear as soon as they move into
their
> new habitat. They might get the advantages of a large city while
> having a back yard that looks out over a rustic idle but there is
no
> way it will be Shangri-La.

Well, I like what Marshal Savage had to say on this topic. He asked
us to imagine a cave man transported to the Middle ages. Meat
hanging in butcher shops! Huts warmed by fire places! To the
caveman's point of view, this is a paradise, but of course it leaves
a lot to be desired from our point of view. And even an inhabitant
of the Middle Ages would scoff at the idea he was living in a
paradise, what with the Black Death and the Spanish Inquisition and
all.

Then take that inhabitant of the Middle Ages and transport him to our
era. Meat wrapped in plastic in refrigerated displays! Central
heating AND air conditioning! Surely paradise! But again, we're
complaining about the crabgrass, and teen pregnancy, etc.

While agreeing that there are no utopias, Savage still insisted that
there can be quantum leaps upward in the standard of living, and that
was all space living would represent. Space settlers will have tons
of personal problems, but the whole thing is worth doing for no other
reason than the improvement in the standard of living.

On the topic of folks perhaps overselling space habitats, I heard one
writer say that the new frontier has always been oversold. The
turkeys didn't REALLY blacken the sky, and those hills weren't REALLY
made of gold. But the Westward Movement nonetheless was a worthwhile
event.

> What do you do in space, what use is a habitat(s) and do we
want/need
> a space based civilisation?

I'd say the best proposal yet for what we will do for a living in
space is build SPS. As for do we need a space based civilization,
I'd say the answer is yes, provided we wish to remain an advancing
industrial civilization. Of course those you were talking about who
would be opposed to space settlement tend to be opposed to this also.

> Some of the forum have been talking about the best way to build a
> habitat and it seems that everybody wants to build it from
scratch.
> There are a lot of large and not so large lumps of metal out there,
> why not start with them and reshape to suit. Instead of building
your
> habitat and coating the outside with slag from your asteroid mining
> operation, why not hollow out and reshape the outside of a largeish
> lump of metal and as you mine, you make your habitat bigger. You
may
> have to reinforce the shell to handle the strain but that should be
> possible.

Given that the atmosphere is going to press outward in all directions
with a force of around 7 lbs/square inch, I'd feel more comfortable
living inside of a manufactured steel hull than some raw nickle iron
astroid material with some reinforcement.